Jong-su comes to a solution and acts on what he believes, but Director Lee is after a different bounty. Jong-su’s obsessive quest to find out what, if anything, happened to Hae-mi and what, if any, role Ben played, forms the second half of the film, but anyone who signs up for Burning expecting a taut mystery-thriller is in for disappointment and frustration. Over the next few days and weeks, two things become clear to Jong-su: 1) No greenhouses near him have burned down, and 2) Hae-mi has vanished completely. Having earlier confessed to the other two that he does not experience emotions the way other people seem to, Ben describes the sensation of watching one of his fires blaze with an almost holy, erotic reverence.īen promises Jong-su that he has identified his next target, someplace that he teases is very close to Jong-su. It’s after Hae-mi has fallen asleep that Ben reveals to Jong-su his secret pastime, and the source of the movie’s title: Every few months, he likes to identify an abandoned greenhouse and set it on fire. Call it attraction, call it fate, call it what you will, but it’s as undeniable as it is unspoken. There’s something that binds these three.

Shot in the dim glow of the evening, the three…well, calling them friends would be overstating things. The centerpiece of the film is a long, boozy evening the three spend at Jong-su’s family farm. And while Jong-su is closed off and floats through the world like an unseen ghost, Ben’s unconcerned charisma bends the world and its inhabitants, including Hae-mi, to his whims.

While Jong-su lives in near-complete isolation, Ben has an inner circle of friends so easily accessible he seems to be utterly bored with their company. While Jong-su has to scramble for money, Ben appears to have no source of income yet has bottomless reserves of cash. Ben is handsome, soft-spoken, and endlessly charming. She brought Ben back with her.Īs played by Walking Dead alum Steven Yeun, Ben is everything that Jong-su longs to be. By the time he gets the phone call that she is coming home and would love a ride back from the airport, Jong-su has worked himself up into full-blown romantic obsession for this girl.Īnd so of course when she gets off the plane, she’s not alone. Jong-su also uses this opportunity to re-live his sexual encounter(s) with Hae-mi, masturbating repeatedly in her bedroom (which…you know…rude). Jong-su dutifully goes to her apartment each day to feed the cat, though the cat itself never actually appears, only the errant turds in the litter box betraying that it might actually exist. It’s not long after they meet that the relationship turns physical, but before Jong-su can determine exactly what this girl means to him, or wants from him, Hae-mi announces that she’s going on a trip to Africa, and would he be so kind as to feed her cat while she’s gone? Their both drifting through life at this point, with no real prospects to look forward to besides the endless grind of part-time work, though Jong-su makes vague, unsupported claims about his ambition to be a writer. She approaches Jong-su in a crowd and informs him that they were childhood acquaintances, though plastic surgery has changed her appearance almost completely. It’s Hae-mi who initiates their, well, calling it a courtship would be overstating things. It begins with the chance meeting of Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) and Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), both aimless twentysomethings eking out a modest living with part-time jobs in Paju, South Korea. Working from a short story by Haruki Murakami (itself inspired by the writing of William Faulkner), writer-director Lee Chang-dong has crafted a film that speaks deeply to the way we build our own truths, and how those truths can outgrow their confines and come to swallow others.īurning takes its time laying out the groundwork over which its strange narrative will play out.

Using an understated mystery and melodrama as a framing device, Burning, now on Blu-ray, is a haunting meditation on the slippery nature of truth and identity in the modern age, one that is sure to linger with you for days after the final credits roll.

Burnin by ray