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South Korean cinema may have reached its pinnacle the moment Parasite took home the Best Picture Oscar in 2020, but the truth is the country’s movie industry has been producing compelling, subversive movies since long before the wider world began paying attention. And it’s not all political commentary and ultraviolence, either. Dig beyond its renaissance era of the early 2000s and you’ll find emotional melodramas, irreverent comedies, disturbing horror and eye-popping action flicks to rival any other film hub on the planet. The only question is where to start. Well, how about here? Any of these 31 Korean classics work as a springboard into the glory of Hallyuwood.
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A favourite of Bong Joon ho, this crime flick is a strong shout for being Korea’s greatest ever film. Director Kim Ki-young’s own inspiration came from flicking through a newspaper and stumbling on the story of a family thrown into chaos by the arrival of a domestic helper. The housemaid, played with a mix of coolness and heat by Lee Eun-shim, is the agent of chaos in his take on the tale: an intoxicating watch that tackles class, sexual allure and family dynamics in a way that will be very familiar to
Is long, intense and ambitious, but it never feels like a slog. It also borrows elements from across the landscape of horror - from zombies to demons to creepy kids - but never turns into a messy patchwork. The story, centering on a police officer racing to save a village from a mysterious virus before it can claim his daughter, unfolds gradually enough that it all seems natural, allowing the sense of dread to envelop you like a fog.
Is the highest-grossing Korean movie in several countries, the first non-English production to win a Best Picture Oscar and universally regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century. All those things are well and good, but Bong Joon-ho’s true achievement was bringing the film’s biting capitalist critique to a global audience. The message isn’t exactly subtle: a destitute family living in the slums of Seoul attaches itself to a wealthy one, to the point of clandestinely living in their house, until the social order inevitably corrects itself. But within that is a thrilling, funny, often disturbing piece of entertainment that left Hollywood’s oblivious elites with no choice but to stand up and cheer. Knowledgeable film fans already awaited every Joon-ho project with breathless anticipation. Now, the world waits with them.
The Handmaiden (2016)
This atmospheric horror fable, adapted from a folk story and released on what was a watershed year for Korean cinema (Bong Joon-ho’s
In both its intricate setting (a gothic mansion full of looming corridors and William Morris wallpaper) and its chilling atmosphere. But it’s elevated even further by Kim Jee-woon’s expert direction and Lee Byung-woo’s Hitchcockian score; the end result is a masterwork of psychological horror from one of Korea’s finest filmmakers.
Dropped, this thriller was the consensus high watermark. Even now, there are many fans – Quentin Tarantino among them – who’d argue it’s still his finest moment. Revolving around a series of real-life murders that shocked a small town in the ’80s,
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Twists the police procedural into a potent indictment of a society unequipped to deal with such violence and death. As is his signature, Bong injects healthy amounts of black humour into the proceedings, as a pair of ill-prepared rural cops team with a big city investigator (Kim Sang-kyung) to bring the killer to justice. But as the body count continues to rise and the trail of clues grows maddeningly indistinct, the cloud of melancholy that hangs over the film becomes increasingly dark and intense. Every twist is delivered with a master’s touch that it’d take the broader world a few more years to recognise.
Screenwriter Lee Chang-dong’s directorial debut begins with a dishevelled man throwing himself in front of a train. Working backward through his life, the movie shows what led him to that point, in the process tracing 20 years of Korean political history, from Asian financial crisis of the late ‘90s to the 1980 clash between citizens and police known as the Gwangju Massacre. It’s a powerful melodrama with an elegiac tone and a heartbreaking endnote.
(1990), this offbeat cult classic also recalls the sci-fi tinged works of Terry Gilliamin its visuals. A US remake was announced back in 2020. Can it possibly be this delirious and giddy?
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Director: Park Ki-hyung South Korean films were subject to heavy censorship during the ’70s, thanks to the country’s authoritarian regime. When the regime fell, it was game on for filmmakers like Park Ki-hyung who’d been forced to sit on their edgier ideas and could ride a new wave of creativity that supercharged Korean cinema. This K-horror, the first in a very loosely connected five-part
Series, is exactly the kind of a movie that would have previously been banned: a chewy indictment on the country’s education system that executes seriously gnarly payback on abusive teachers via a supernatural force.
Park Chan-wook’s breakthrough doesn’t have the kinetic energy nor the bloodlust of his later films, but this mashed-up murder mystery-cum-police procedural-cum-political thriller is equally stunning and just as gut-wrenching. After a shooting within the heavily militarised DMZ between North and South Korean leaves a North Korean soldier dead, an army major (Lee Young-ae, later the star of Chan-wook’s
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) is brought in to investigate, and discovers that just about everyone involved is lying, though not for reasons that are immediately obvious. Seizing upon the omnipresent tension between North and South Korea to convey the toll the conflict takes on citizens of both nations,
’s Ma Dong-seok – join forces to catch a serial killer on the loose in Seoul. As with the best Korean genre pictures, Won-Tae Lee takes a cookie cutter story and ups the style to such dazzling heights that the clichés warp into something unrecognisable. Full of insane car chases, brutal fistfights and a lot of awesome suits, Sylvester Stallone bought the rights to a potential American remake, which gives you some indication of the class it’s in.
A master craftsman adept whose filmmaking is underpinned by a total command of mood, Lee Chang-dong is at his formidable best in a slow-burn thriller based on a Haruki Murakami short story, which features a Murakami-esque blend of missing women, lovelorn men, hungry cats and jazz. The alchemy between Lee and the Japanese author’s work seems obvious in retrospect – both love to bend their stories in unpredictable, ambiguous directions. But Lee adds very specific Korean concerns around class divisions, as well as the north-south divide, as a farm boy-turned-wannabe writer falls in with a mysterious playboy with some sinister hobbies.
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But what it lacks in narrative originality it makes up for in flawless execution. The intricate story of a power struggle within a crime syndicate is brought to life by magnetic performances from
’s massive global success, Netflix added a bunch of director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s films to its platform. This powerful courtroom drama starring Gong Yoo (
) is the highlight. It’s based on shocking true events that took place at the Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, in which deaf students were systematically abused by staff members. Despite its heavy subject matter, over four million South Koreans flocked to see it at the cinema. A criminal investigation was also re-opened in the aftermath, leading to law changes aimed at protecting minors.
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. It’s the movie that drew international attention to the revolution happening in the country’s film industry, and with good reason, and the middle instalment of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy is an experience completely of its own genre. When the movie starts, the protagonist (Choi Min-sik) is being kept in a small room against his will by unseen captors for reasons that have never been explained. His situation only worsens after he is released 15 years later. Framed for wife’s murder, he sets out to find who stole the last decade of his life from him – and get revenge. The actual plot machinations are admittedly convoluted, but the intensity of the filmmaking explodes all shreds of disbelief.
A prolific auteur who specialises in funny, self-reflexive films about movie directors learning awkward life lessons, Hong Sang-soo may sound like a Korean Woody Allen on paper but has a much more formally playful streak. It’s showcased in this entertaining and radically structured story about a male movie director who falls for a painter he meets while passing the time at a film festival in Suwon. We see their day together once; then we see it all over again, only with slight differences. This cinematic spot-the-difference device not only commands your undivided attention,
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