Korean Cinema - vo.rs

Bong Joon-ho: Genre as Scalpel

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

When Parasite swept the 2020 Oscars — the first film not in English to win Best Picture — a lot of viewers met Bong Joon-ho for the first time and assumed they had discovered a new auteur. They had discovered a twenty-year veteran at the peak of a project he had been running since his debut. Every Bong film is a genre film that turns, halfway through, into an autopsy of a class system. The monster movie is about incompetent government. The murder mystery is about a nation that cannot see its own poor. The heist is about who gets to ride at the front of the train. He picks up the tools of popular cinema — the ones that put bodies in seats — and uses them as a scalpel to open society up and show you the organs.

Oldboy: The Corridor, the Twist, and Park Chan-wook's Rage

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Oldboy has been reduced, over twenty years, to three things: a man eating a live octopus, a fight down a corridor filmed in one long sideways take, and a twist so vicious that people who have never seen the film know to be careful discussing it. That reduction does the film a disservice, because underneath the shocks Park Chan-wook made a genuine tragedy — a revenge story so total that it swallows the avenger, the target, and the audience’s own appetite for revenge along with them. Revisited now, with the initial jolt long spent, it plays less like a provocation and more like a Greek drama with the lights turned all the way up.

Korean Genre Cinema: Ten to Start With

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Something extraordinary happened to Korean cinema around the turn of the millennium. Democratisation had lifted decades of political censorship, a screen-quota system protected home-grown films from being crowded out, and a generation of obsessive cinephile directors arrived all at once with the technical confidence to attempt anything and the nerve to blend genres that other national cinemas keep carefully apart. The result is the most tonally daring popular cinema on earth — films that swerve from broad slapstick to a gut-punch tragedy inside a single scene and simply trust the audience to keep pace. When Parasite swept the Academy Awards in 2020, the wider world caught up with something Korean audiences had taken for granted for two decades.

Memories of Murder: Bong's Unsolved Case as National Wound

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Long before Parasite swept the Oscars, Bong Joon-ho announced himself with his second feature, Memories of Murder, released in South Korea in 2003. It is a police procedural about a real string of murders that had gone unsolved for over a decade, and it remains, for my money, the finest thing he has ever made — a film that starts as a rural whodunit, curdles into a study of institutional rot, and ends on an image so precisely aimed that it reframes everything before it.