Classics of modern South Korean cinema – ranked!
Global interest in Korean film has been piqued by Bong Joon-ho’s satirical Parasite, which has won the Palme d’Or and best picture at the Oscars. Here are 19 more Korean masterpieces
20. Daytime Drinking (2008)
A microbudget special that taps into Korean cinema’s fascination with the world of excessive drinking: sociability, politeness, drunkenness, loneliness. A lovelorn young guy is persuaded to come with his boozy friends for a weekend break to a seaside town, only to find that they haven’t shown up and his misadventures with strangers escalate.
19. Take Care of My Cat (2001)
Jeong Jae-eun made a stylish and likable debut with this film, talky and Europeanised – a cult classic for Korean film fans. Five young women find that their friendship is under pressure after they leave high school in the provincial town of Incheon. One rich kid moves away to Seoul, causing some resentment and the others left behind reassess their relationships.
18. House of Hummingbird (2018)
Kim Bora’s quasi-autobiographical film about a 14-year-old girl and her relationship with her sister, brother and parents who work very long hours in a ricecake shop. She begins to flower under the attention of a kindly teacher and may even be on the verge of finding love.
17. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996)
Never was a title more misleading, because there are no pigs and no wells, and even looking for them in a metaphorical sense is tricky. Garrulous, droll, angsty and quirky, this movie introduced us to the world of Korea’s US-trained film-maker Hong Sang-soo, who devised this semi-improvised tale of four people in Seoul.
16. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Kim Jee-woon delivers a tasty example of Korean psycho-horror. A middle-aged doctor has an elegant, sharp-tongued second wife, and two daughters who have just returned home from a clinic. Their loathing of their stepmother finds a supernatural echo in strange goings-on in the house.
15. Memories of Murder (2003)
Bong Joon-ho had a superb breakthrough with this true-crime nightmare, based on the real case of a Zodiac-style Korean serial killer who murdered 10 women in Hwaeseong between 1986 and 1991 without being captured. Bong’s film renewed interest in the case, and the killer was finally identified and charged in 2019 after arrest on another crime, but could not be prosecuted for the Hwaeseong murders because the statute of limitations had expired. Bong’s longtime leading man Song Kang-ho (the dopey dad from Parasite) plays the chaotic detective in charge.
14. Paju (2009)
With this film, Park Chan-ok revealed herself as one of Korean cinema’s smartest and most stylish talents. Like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, it is set in the tense border zone with North Korea’s DPRK, and it is complex and enigmatic. A young girl has a difficult, ambiguous relationship with her elder sister’s charismatic husband: a teacher and community leader with a dark personal history.
13. Painted Fire (2002)
Veteran Korean film-maker Im Kwon-taek split the best director prize at Cannes (with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love) for this film, a passionate yet high-minded picture – a costume drama on a grander scale than is now fashionable in Korean cinema. It is about the 19th-century Korean artist Jang Seung-eop, whose life unfolds alongside his country’s domestic upheavals: it is beautifully shot and grippingly told.
12. Peppermint Candy (1999)
This was the film that introduced cinephiles and Koreaphiles to the fiercely talented Lee Chang-dong: a back-to-front narrative study of a man who we see at first taking his own life by throwing himself under a train. We see the scenes-from-a-life that led up to this in reverse order, which show a histrionic and not especially sympathetic man.
11. Mother (2009)
Like his Memories Of Murder, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is, in some ways, a straightforward psychological suspense thriller, with a lively and satirical sense of how forensics – that supposedly exact science – can go terribly wrong. But this is also a hypnotically strange and gripping study of a middle-aged woman who sets out to get her learning-disabled son off a murder charge.
10. Whispering Corridors (1998)
A classic of Korean horror which is also a fierce attack on Korean authoritarianism and conformism — it was at the cusp of the Korean cinema revival; this was the film that whetted the Western taste for East Asia’s scary movies, and it went on to spawn four sequels. In a girls’ school, certain teachers are hated and feared for their sadistic discipline and punishments and also for the obsessive way that students are valued only for the way they can pump up the school’s university admission statistics. It triggers bizarre deaths and supernatural happenings. There is a scene in which a human face rushes up from the end of a corridor to the camera that will make you jump out of your seat.
9. The Way Home (2002)
Lee Jeong-hyang’s lovely, gentle film showed a kind of Korean cinema that plucks at the heartstrings and plays the sweetest of tunes but which is nonetheless utterly direct and unsentimental. A small and somewhat stroppy boy is taken to live with his very old and mute grandmother in the countryside way outside the big city: we are given to understand there is some kind of crisis in his parents’ marriage and this is the reason his mum has parked him there. From then on, it is almost a silent movie as the relationship between the angry, lonely boy and his enigmatic grandma unfolds.
8. Snowpiercer (2013)
Here is one of Bong Joon-ho’s most crazily inspired creations, produced by Park Chan-wook — a staggeringly futuristic all-star drama with Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton, about a train with a microcosmic class-based society aboard, hundreds of years into a new Ice Age, cutting through the snow and ice. It is a film adored with cult-like devotion by its many fans, perhaps especially because it was bought for distribution by Harvey Weinstein who tried to bully Bong into cutting 25 minutes from the running time, and when Bong refused – and could prove his director’s cut was testing better – Weinstein petulantly restricted the release, which meant that Snowpiercer was not widely seen in cinemas, but the legend lives on.
7. Secret Sunshine (2007)
An underrated and deeply strange film from Lee that touches on a persistent, but little-noticed theme in Korean cinema: religion and Christianity. Jeon Do-yeon plays a woman in her 30s whose son is abducted and killed and in her anguish, she turns to religion, throwing herself fervently into this new devotional existence in a desperate attempt to cauterise the unimaginable pain. She even demands to visit the imprisoned killer of her son, but the encounter goes horribly awry, in a way that challenges the whole idea of forgiveness and redemption – it’s an extraordinary “prison visit” scene.
6. Right Now, Wrong Then (2016)
Hong Sang-soo reached what many of his admirers believe to be the apotheosis of his amiably talkative, humorously uneventful character studies with this Groundhog Day-type film in which a famous film director (played by Jung Jae-young) comes to a strange town to attend a screening of one of his films, and karmically meets-cute twice over with a beautiful young woman (played by Kim Min-hee). The first time it ends badly with too much drink taken and his reputation as a married womaniser souring their friendship; the second time, things seem subtly different and yet it’s not at all clear that this is the “happy” ending that eluded them in the first version or if moral or emotional lessons of any sort are getting learned. This is just life, in all its contingent messiness, getting a do-over, but not necessarily improved.
5. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring (2003)
Kim Ki-duk is a director renowned for his extreme and ultraviolent horror movies such as 3-Iron, and his reputation has taken a bad knock with #MeToo accusations of sexual assault that were not proved. But his Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … And Spring is an atypical film in many ways: gentle, quiet, ruminative, and possessed of a Buddhist belief that time, youth and age are an illusion.
A boy lives under the care of an old monk and is punished for tormenting small animals (Kim himself was criticised for animal cruelty in the making of his 2000 film The Isle). Spring turns to summer, the boy grows to manhood and is warned by the elder of submitting to lust, and then the man grows towards the age of his mentor and proceeds to a kind of fraught enlightenment.
4. Poetry (2011)
Lee Chang-dong asserted his claim to real filmic and artistic greatness with this beautiful and mysterious film. Yun Jung-hie plays Mija, a sixtysomething grandmother who looks after her troubled teen grandson who lives with her in her modest apartment. She is suffering from the early signs of dementia, and this terrible news inspires her to take classes in poetry. Before the facility of language deserts her utterly, Mija wishes to write a single poem. And yet this isn’t the only crisis in her life: there is a crisis connected with her grandson, which complicates the film’s tragic quality. Without realising it, Mija is developing the soul of a poet in the shadow of disaster and death. She is making sense of her life: this is the “poetry” that is taking place, day by day, minute by minute.
3. Oldboy (2003)
Extreme cinema never got freakier or more extreme than this quite extraordinary revenge horror which went above and beyond anything we had seen before: it claimed the allegiance of an army of superfans, although Spike Lee’s English-language remake was not well judged. Choi Min-sik plays Dae-su, an arrogant and obnoxious man whose nightmare begins on a rainy night in Seoul in the 1980s. Drunk and incapable, he is abducted by an unknown figure and imprisoned in what appears to be a tatty hotel room – for 15 years, fed, clothed, kept alive with horrifying and apparently motiveless malice, as Dae-su screams, rages and pleads. But the future is to hold his release and his terrible vengeance. The film is renowned for a bizarre moment when Dae-su eats a live octopus for the sheer existential defiance.
2. Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon-ho’s upstairs-downstairs satirical masterpiece Parasite, the Palme D’Or and best picture Oscar-winner features a low-achieving family living cheek-by-jowl in a scuzzy, stinky basement flat. The teenage son flukes a plum job as an after-school tutor to a teenage girl who lives in a colossal modernist mansion. Cunningly, he gets his elder sister in as an “art tutor” to the kid brother of this wealthy household, and it isn’t long before mum and dad have scammed jobs there also as chauffeur and housekeeper, all pretending to be not related, brilliantly playing on their rich employers’ smugness, fastidiousness and cocooned naivety. Parasite is about the perennial topic of class and 21st-century servitude, and it is about the fundamental issue of inequality. The film has a crazy and exuberant theatricality, with broad streaks of farce, and also a strong if unexpected element of sympathy. Veteran player Song Kang-ho – who has become the face of Korean cinema — projects such pathos and even gentleness in his muddle-headed need to do the right thing by his family.
1. The Handmaiden (2016)
Park Chan-wook, a veteran of extreme cinema with his “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) in 2016 created a glorious erotic suspense thriller in The Handmaiden, a sumptuously designed period drama based on Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith. It is a film to compare with Hitchcock’s Rebecca or Nagisa Oshima’s In The Realm of the Senses. In Japanese-ruled colonial Korea of the 1930s, a con-man posing as a nobleman persuades a pickpocket of his lowlife acquaintance to get a job as a handmaiden to a beautiful, wealthy young woman, who is being exploited by her hideous old father. The plan is that she will assist his sinister plan to seduce this heiress, elope with her and then have her incarcerated in a lunatic asylum – in return for which the “handmaiden” is promised a few jewels. But things go terribly wrong, and there is an unforgettable whiplash plot twist which sends us all the way back to the beginning of the story. The exquisitely beautiful Kim Min-hee is excellent as the heiress with all her gamine innocence, petulance and entitlement, and Kim Tae-ri is superb as the handmaiden herself: smart, worldly, talented in the ways of deceit and yet with an unsuspected streak of romance. It is a classic tale of crime, sex, ambition and love.
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