Critics reviews

Burning is a well-crafted film. With Lee, the cinematic style specific to each of his movies is always tied closely to its central concerns. In Burning, this relates not only to the use of light, but also the ways in which he frames even the simplest actions in order to create a 'cloud' of the not-quite-visible.

There’s something disquieting in his [Yeun's] presence, as there is in the restrained ambiguity of the storytelling – we are encouraged to both construct our own conclusions and to dismantle them at the same time. It’s chilling and brilliant.

Jongsu doesn’t really understand Haemi’s interest in the ‘Great Hunger’, the Kalahari bushmen’s quest for meaning in life, but the way his resentment of Ben’s privilege and confidence evolves into paranoia and rage matches a global, inchoate anger, especially amongst the young.

Every new development seeds the one that comes after and changes your perspective on what went before, right up to a climax where those oscillating reversals take place across a single shocking moment, sending you out into the night with a gift: a story that is fully spent and wholly satisfying but eternally, burningly mysterious.

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Where the likes of 2007’s Secret Sunshine and 2010’s Poetry affirmed Lee’s precise narrative facility, in Burning it’s the play of ambiguity which draws us in...

The film’s ending is magnificent — batty but magnificent. But by then there are so many loose ends, volitional or not, that we’re either lost in confusion or gamely enjoying our fight with the tentacles of a giant squid whom we’re trying to put on a plate, tamed, cooked and tenderised.

Slow and difficult to get a hold on, Burning emerges as a brilliantly made one-off; puzzling, intelligent and ultimately mesmerising. And Jong-seo Jun is a revelation.

It’s a highly discomfiting, richly confounding take on the thriller, with wealthy, viciously indifferent maybe-villain Ben (Steven Yeun) as unsatisfying an object of prey as Jeon Jong-soo’s Haemi is as an object of romantic affection.

Lee Chang-dong’s most alluring film depicts a gauzy youthful ardor that foments obsession and imbues an otherwise desultory aspiring writer with a sense of purpose.

All three of the film’s main characters are dispensed with by Lee in this unsentimental movie that shows human connection as fragile and masked when the friends are unequal.

The movie feels like an extended stalemate between two very different master storytellers [Lee and Murakami], though the clash of sensibilities is also instructive, pointing to a tension in contemporary life between individualist and systems-based philosophies.