This article was written exclusively for The Film Magazine by Jack Cameron.
It’s unfair to claim that modern cinema consists only of sequels and reboots, but in a chaotic world it’s understandable that many viewers turn to familiar heroes and retold stories for comfort. Nostalgia-driven films often perform strongly at the box office, yet the appeal of nostalgia is changing. Audiences increasingly seek layers and ambiguity rather than straightforward reassurance.
Later this year Kenneth Branagh will return as Hercule Poirot — a character so iconic he can be recognised by voice and moustache alone. Agatha Christie’s detective fiction, born in the 1920s, famously exposed human darkness beneath a veneer of aristocratic propriety, attracting readers still haunted by the First World War. Today, however, Christie’s plots are widely known: many viewers approach mysteries already believing they know the outcome.
Released in 2018, Burning, directed by Lee Chang-dong, offers a very different kind of mystery. Unlike the tidy parlour-room revelations of Poirot, Burning refuses to hand the audience a definitive solution. Many of the film’s crucial clues — and even the episode of violence around which the narrative pivots — remain offscreen or ambiguous. Yet this refusal to pin the story down makes Burning one of the most compelling and relevant films of recent years.
Burning is not a surreal puzzle à la David Lynch in which everything can be dismissed as dream logic. The film can be read in a way that yields a clear interpretation, but that reading rests on inference rather than incontrovertible evidence. Lee doesn’t deny facts; he makes them slippery. The film doesn’t dispute what we might want to believe — it interrogates why we accept those beliefs in the first place.
Adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami and co-written with Jungmi Oh, Lee relocates the Japanese source to contemporary South Korea. The film follows Jong-su (Ah-In Yoo), a young man who aspires to be a writer while working on his father’s rundown farm as the elder faces legal trouble. Early on Jong-su reconnects with Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jun), a former classmate. After a brief date she asks him to look after her cat while she travels to Africa. On her return, she introduces him to Ben (Steven Yeun), an impeccably dressed and enigmatic figure. A tense triangle develops as Jong-su struggles to measure up to Ben’s effortless wealth and charm. Plot summaries quickly grow inadequate: each scene shifts tone, opening into new genres and deepening the mystery rather than clarifying it.
Burning begins with a tracking shot that introduces Jong-su on a delivery run. The camera follows his truck, then reveals him emerging from behind it to collect a parcel and walk through a city street. That opening sequence establishes one of the film’s dominant concerns — social inequality in modern Korea — and sets the visual tone. Lee is a poetic filmmaker; even the most straightforward shot is densely composed and thematically charged. His characters are frequently marginalized, and his films aim to restore their complexity. Lee rarely offers single, tidy definitions; instead, by the end every line of dialogue reverberates with layered meaning. From the first frame, Burning sets up a sense that there is always more than what appears on the surface.
Hae-mi is equally layered. Her presence carries double meanings: she has undergone plastic surgery and Jong-su mentions a childhood insult in which he once called her ugly. Their tentative romance carries an undercurrent of uncertainty — is her transformation a critique of the impossible beauty standards imposed on women, or is it a form of retaliation? Lee’s brilliance lies in presenting ordinary interactions that gradually feel uncanny; everyday motives are rendered strange and hard to trust.
Hae-mi has taken up pantomime and demonstrates by miming the act of peeling and eating a tangerine. She insists that the trick is not to fake the fruit, but to “forget that it’s not there.” This idea becomes unsettling when Jong-su agrees to feed a cat that never appears on camera. The possibility arises that the cat never existed and that Jong-su is being duped — yet he continues caring for it because he is falling in love. Love can make the illogical feel perfectly reasonable; in that sense, forgetting the cat’s nonexistence is a kind of emotional truth.
Ben is perhaps the film’s most inscrutable figure. Viewers feel instinctively suspicious of him, but very little about his background or how he acquires wealth is ever explained. Jong-su eventually describes Ben as a “Gatsby,” a shorthand for an affluent, mysterious man. That description reveals how we often understand people through metaphor rather than factual detail — a cautionary note about the limits of our interpretations.
Lee consistently cultivates an uncanny atmosphere. Many shots play with focus, lingering on foreground objects before shifting attention to the background. Those visual choices extend the theme of partial knowledge: ordinary scenes acquire new depths as the film reorients the viewer’s gaze.
Midway through the story Hae-mi vanishes. Several readings are possible: Ben may have murdered her and disposed of the body; she may have walked away to escape an indifferent world. What troubles Jong-su most is not only her disappearance but how quickly others forget she ever mattered. Her absence passes almost unnoticed by the society around him — a chilling indictment of indifference.
Many conclusions can be drawn from Burning, but the film resists letting any single interpretation dominate. For every argument the audience might make, the film offers a counterpoint; for every plausible theory, an alternative perspective waits. The visible action is only the tip of a much larger emotional and symbolic iceberg. At one point Ben asks Jong-su what he plans to write about. Jong-su replies that he doesn’t know, because “the world is a mystery.” That statement is not surrender—it’s humility, an acknowledgement that complexity persists even when we prefer tidy answers.
Burning arrived in an era of overwhelming information, when countless explanations and viewpoints compete for attention. It challenges the tendency to cling to simple narratives. Recent mainstream films have started to echo this complexity: Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, for example, playfully subverts the classic drawing-room reveal even as it pays homage to it.
Ultimately, Burning embraces the elusiveness of truth. It gives us a primary story while containing many others beneath the surface, and it invites viewers to think beyond the obvious. The film doesn’t demand certainty; it encourages sustained questioning.
Written by Jack Cameron
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