Burning

Judged on the theatrical cut of 148 minutes. The subtractive test meets resistance in most of the film, because nearly every object is planted twice. The cheap pink watch Jong-su wins in a shop draw and gives Hae-mi turns up in Ben’s bathroom drawer among other women’s trinkets. The cat he feeds and never sees comes, in Ben’s car park, to the name he knows. The well she says he pulled her from is denied by her family and conceded by his mother. What gives is length in the third movement, and it gives more than a little: the dawn runs past the greenhouses repeat a compulsion already shown, and the mother’s two scenes restate an abandonment the film has made clear. The search carries the compulsion, but it is longer than the knowledge needs.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds as far as it goes. A young man with no place in the economy, the son of a farmer on trial for his temper, cannot tell whether he has been wronged, because the rich man who may have wronged him is closed to him: Ben yawns, cooks and hosts, and gives nothing away. Resentment without proof seeks an object, and finds one. A second truth is the disposability of a woman neither man sees: Hae-mi’s debts, surgery and hunger are noticed by the film and by no one in it. What holds it below the bar of the Epochal Gate is that much of the film’s governing uncertainty is a mood, a dread that refuses to become a meaning, and the film rests on it by design. That share is atmosphere, not disclosure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The summit is the dusk at Paju. High on Ben’s marijuana, Hae-mi takes off her top and dances against the last light to Miles Davis’s music for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, dancing the Little Hunger and the Great Hunger she learned of in Africa, and then she weeps. It is one of the great held shots of its decade. Other heights recur: the light reflected from Namsan Tower that reaches her room for a few minutes a day, and the dream in which the boy Jong-su watches a greenhouse burn. The ending is a dreadful summit: a stabbing in snow on an empty road, a car burning, a naked man shaking in a truck. Held below by frequency: the long middle of the search is level dread rather than elevation, and height comes less often than the best scenes promise.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The myths are set in objects rather than cited. The Great Hunger is named by Hae-mi and enacted by her dance and by Jong-su’s whole search. The well is the rescue myth, a child in a pit and a boy who saves her, and the film makes it unverifiable, so the founding myth of their bond may be invented. Ben is the leisured hunter who takes what is useless and says he burns a greenhouse every two months; Jong-su is the son of Faulkner’s arsonist father, and in the end it is he who burns. He names Ben a Gatsby. The archetypes are many, and that is the charge: several are literary, inherited with the story or borrowed by name, and the film’s refusal to settle them leaves them suspended and evoked more often than built to bear the load.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is triple: Lee’s own humane realism in Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Secret Sunshine and Poetry, patient, social and plainly told; Murakami’s story, a weightless urban fable in which nothing is ever done; and the art-film mystery of the vanished woman, L’Avventura (1960) above all, with Vertigo behind it. The turns are real. Against his own manner, Lee made a thriller whose central facts are withheld. Against the source, he moved a Tokyo anecdote into Korean class rage and the border country, gave the narrator a farm, a father on trial and a knife, and made him act. The stake was a return after eight years with a young star in the lead. Held below the gate because the vanishing left unsolved is a path L’Avventura proved, and the genre turn is taken toward a form audiences already know.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a man without standing cannot know what he suspects, and that suspicion writes its own story. The camera is bound to Jong-su, and we see only what he sees. The evidence is built so that it does not prove: a watch, a cat that comes to a common sound, a reservoir Ben looks at, a greenhouse that is not burnt. The late shots of Jong-su at Hae-mi’s laptop, writing, open the possibility that the ending is his novel, so the form folds the act of narration into the crime. Told from outside him, with a greenhouse burning or Hae-mi found, the knowledge would become a plot. Held below the top because the closing violence gives a resolution the form had trained the viewer to distrust, and the laptop half pays for it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise, and eight years supply little evidence, so the figure is a forecast, and a forecast is discounted. The questions are built to stay open: whether Ben killed Hae-mi or anyone; whether the cat existed; whether the well existed; whether the killing happens or is written; whether Jong-su’s love is love or possession. Readings have accumulated beyond the mystery: the film as a portrait of youth unemployment and class in Korea, as an adaptation that argues with Murakami, as a study of a woman made the object of two men’s stories, and as a meditation on fiction-making. Formally it yields on return. What holds it: eight years is a short demonstration, and part of the return is to a puzzle whose pieces do not change; the viewer comes back to the same five unproved objects.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that the art-film mystery of the unsolved disappearance could carry a class argument, and that indeterminacy could be the content of a social film rather than an evasion of it, a thriller whose solution is withheld as honesty about what its hero can know. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in criticism and short in time, the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, a place on most lists of the decade’s best, the first Korean film on the Academy’s foreign-language shortlist. Redirection of later films is not shown. It is paired with Parasite (2019) as a Korean film of class, but as a sibling, not a source, and the figure is mostly force.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric across about eight years, and eight years is what holds the axis lowest: survival that short can be forecast and barely shown. The film as released survives whole. A shorter version made for Japanese television is a derivative, not a replacement, and no loss or altered release is known. Presence is wide for an art film of its years: theatrical release across Asia, Europe and North America, home video and streaming, festival and repertory revivals, teaching. A wide presence earns a little and is given. The surface ages a little: smartphones, a Porsche and the loudspeakers on the border fix the film to its year, though the farm, the light and the fire do not date.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography carries the form: the dusk shot held in fading light, the reflected light of Namsan crossing a small room, the greenhouses at dawn in mist, the last fire in snow. The editing is patient and exact, cutting so that scenes end before they explain. Mowg’s score is sparse percussion and held tension, used rarely, and the Miles Davis cue is placed once. Steven Yeun makes Ben’s ease a menace without a single overt act; Yoo Ah-in’s slack-mouthed stillness hides the knife until it shows; Jeon Jong-seo, in a first role, gives Hae-mi both the performer and the person. The costs: the length shows in the search, Yoo’s opacity sometimes reads as blankness rather than pressure, and the ending is staged more conventionally than the film around it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the tangerine peeled from nothing in a Seoul bar, a light comedy of flirtation, and the stabbing on the snowy road. One law governs both: what is not seen is supplied by desire, and what desire supplies becomes real enough to act on. The tangerine is the law stated as a joke; the cat, the well, the burnt greenhouse and Ben’s guilt are the law applied; the killing is the law obeyed to its end. The father’s trial, the mother’s return and Ben’s party, where Hae-mi’s story is laughed at, obey it too: each character is known to others only as a story. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to murder. The strain is the switch from passive watching to violence, which the laptop scene reconciles but does not fully earn.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what a film of 148 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Jong-su, held close and unreadable; the family, in a father on trial, a mother who left and returns, Hae-mi’s estranged mother and sister; labour, in delivery work, street promotion, a dying farm and a calf; class, in Gangnam and Paju; the state and the nation, in a courtroom and in the loudspeakers of the North across the border fields; gender, in a woman passed between two men’s stories; the natural order, in fields, greenhouses, sunsets and snow; the sacred, as the Great Hunger. Rage, class and desire are one movement. What holds it at its figure: almost everything routes through one consciousness, Hae-mi’s interior is withheld by design, a cost the film knows and still pays, and history and the state are heard as noise rather than entered.

Score: 7.8 / 10