Critics reviews

Joint Security Area isn’t the most graphic movie in Park’s body of work, but it’s the most soul-crushing, and the most informative of who Park is, or would go on to become.

Given the narrative’s sharp, intricate setup—so rich in innuendo, sleights of hand, logistics, and secrets and lies—its subsequent straightforwardness is rather disappointing... There are, in this military thriller, seeds of a more expansive gothic sensibility.

JSA offers a picture of arbitrary barriers, and the punishments for those who cross them, but it also suggests that this picture conceals as much as it reveals, containing a secret history of resistance and transgression for those with eyes to see and decode a truth hidden in plain sight.

It's decently directed and acted... although it fudges the political questions by casting the ultra-charismatic Song Kang-Ho as the main commie soldier. But the message that all Koreans could get along fine if it wasn't for those pesky ideologies and uniforms doesn't mean a thing outside Korea, and the film is too entranced by all the male bonding to begin to function as an effective mystery.

"Joint Security Area" is neither as convoluted nor as violent as "Oldboy," though plenty of blood is shed. Set in a particularly tense area of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, it is a fairly straightforward whodunit with a pointedly political theme and an unapologetically humanist message.

There've been about a dozen recent moronic Hollywood military mysteries with just this kind of flashback structure, but Park, working from a novel by Park Sang-yeon, skips the obvious twist-and-shock approach and focuses most of his attention on the actual events, seen during a long sequence in the middle of the film.

“Joint Security Area” is a timely, accessible slice of quality mainstream cinema that further confirms the commercial maturity of the peninsula’s southern industry.

As relations with North Korea change and the two nations draw closer together, this film perhaps serves best as a record of South Koreans' fears and hopes for reconciliation.