“Burning” (2018) directed and written by Lee Chang-dong is an engrossing, bleak, and somber slow-burn psychological thriller based on the short story “Barn Burning,” written by Haruki Murakami. Its unyielding power comes from its earnest and near-perfect screenplay, and it was a promising contender for the Foreign Language Film Oscar race.
Childhood friends Shin Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo) and Lee Jongsu (Yoo Ahn-In) reunite randomly as adults. She and Jongsu develop a strange relationship and she embarks on a trip to Africa, where she returns with an eccentric man named Ben (Steven Yeun).
Haemi and Jongsu reminisce on their lives growing up in a farming village and go out for drinks when they reunite. Slightly tipsy, Haemi begins talking about her studies in pantomime.
She shows off what she has learned by pretending to eat a tangerine, and her gestures are so specific you begin to think that a tangerine was in fact sitting in her palms. As Jongsu admires her gestures, she begins to speak of hunger.
Some of the themes within the film are subject for interpretation, but there seems to be a common motif, which is hunger.
Everyone seems to be hungry for something in this film. For instance, there are brutal depictions of survival of the fittest eerily showcased throughout the film and in its characters.
There’s also the story of “two” South Koreas – the first being a country of leisure and the other, a country of economic turmoil and economic desperation. For example, Ben is a direct contrast to Jongsu, who lies on one end of the spectrum and lives on his family farm tending to the farm animals while Ben lives in a high-rise.
Additionally, the film is also a profound examination of ambiguous male and female relationships. A subtle investigation begins to unfold during the second act of the film, where the audience starts to examine Jongsu and Ben’s intentions around Haemi.
Aside from offering a multitude of various themes, the film does a great job of providing profound character studies.
When Haemi goes off on her trip, she asks Jongsu to cat-sit. Jongsu travels from his family farm to Seoul in a battered pick-up truck, all to feed a cat that is never seen or heard. It’s impossible to avoid thinking Haemi made the cat up, but somehow, the food vanishes and the litter box is full.
Jongsu is a character who has suffered many losses. When he was younger, his mother left, his father recently got into trouble with the law, and just as the audience begins to think he is developing a romance with Haemi, Ben comes into the picture.
Jongsu immediately feels like there’s something “off” about the guy, and Ben is set up as a Gatsby-type character as he is rich, but the audience never learns what his profession is. He’s mysterious and during one scene, mentions that one of his hobbies is burning down greenhouses for fun.
The film fluctuates between amorphous borders, in a way it’s like Schrodinger’s (or in this case, Haemi’s) cat, as it feels like it’s in a state of being and non-being.
For instance, the phone frequently rings at Jonsgu’s farm, but no one is on the other end, and to further emphasize these borders, the film points out how Jongsu’s farm is nearly one checkpoint away from North Korea – quite literally existing on a border.
These blurred lines constantly present make for an often eerie and disorienting experience, where it’s hard to believe what might be staring you dead in the face, and hard to distinguish between “what is,” and “what isn’t” in this film.
The dangers in the film could either be allegorical and a fragment of an illusion, or completely real. Either way the characters are still in real and present danger, though the audience can never distinguish the source. It adds a bubbling tension to an overall strange story.
It’s not quite a love story, or a horror film, but there is a sense that it is both nevertheless.
The film is strange and profound and disorienting. The characters actions are slow, but the sense that something is always off, like if the concept of the uncanny valley was brought into a film, it’s a hard feeling to shrug off, even after the credits have rolled.