Burning film review: Lee Chang-dong’s Haruki Murakami adaptation is more proof he’s the best director you’ve never heard of

Lee Chang-dong may be the best director you’ve never heard of. He has made just six films, each of them wonderful and largely unknown to Western audiences, over a peripatetic career that has also included a stint as culture minister in the South Korean government.

Burning, adapted from a Haruki Murakami story, is his best yet; a simmering, languorous thriller that reaches a pitch of acute psychological horror by the end of its two and a half hour runtime.

Our protagonist is the recently graduated and resolutely jobless Jong-soo (Yoo Ah-in), a would-be novelist reckoning with his perilous financial status. He reconnects with Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), an old school pal similarly marooned on the peripheries of South Korean capitalism.

They sleep together, and then Hae-mi abruptly leaves for Africa, with Jong-soo agreeing to feed her cat while she’s away. By the time she returns, Hae-mi has made a new friend: Ben (Steven Yeun), a mysterious scion of Korea’s upper classes whose wealth is never explained. They form an unlikely trio, and the film becomes a Pinteresque three-hander, full of tense, elliptical conversations thrumming with hidden meanings.

The dominant theme is class, and its emotional costs: Ben drives a Porsche and has a swanky apartment in Seoul; Jong-soo drives a beat-up pick-up and lives on a small farm that borders the DMZ. The relationship between the two is fascinating – does Jong-soo hate Ben? Or is there some intangible complicity between them, with Hae-mi figuring as the vessel for their collusion?

Yeun’s performance is masterful – he plays Ben like the bastard-child of Gordon Gekko and Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter – but Yoo’s is something else entirely, managing to infuse all the impotent rage of male failure with the keening befuddlement of youth.

The film’s cleverest manoeuvre is to make its villain ambiguous – despite Ben’s obvious malevolence, it is Jong-soo who ultimately seems the more sinister. If Ben’s evil is the outgrowth of his wealth, Jong-soo’s is the product of his gender.

In the best possible way, Burning is about ideas: class; toxic masculinity; the search for meaning. It transcends its plot and points beyond itself, illuminating a lonely, uncertain country burying its pathologies beneath an immense, dizzying economic boom.