Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) is a film that refuses to be easily categorized. It begins as a quiet character study, morphs into a psychological thriller, and ultimately reveals itself as a searing critique of modern alienation. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s enigmatic short story Barn Burning, the film transcends its source material, weaving a tale that lingers long after the final frame—not because it provides answers, but because it dares to sit with the unsettling questions of class, power, and the human hunger for meaning.
At its surface, Burning follows Lee Jong-su, an aspiring writer adrift in his own life. He is a man caught between worlds: between the rural poverty of his family’s failing farm and the distant promise of creative fulfillment, between his quiet infatuation with a childhood acquaintance, Shin Hae-mi, and his growing resentment toward Ben, the wealthy, inscrutable man who enters her life. The plot unfolds with deliberate slowness, each scene layering tension beneath seemingly mundane interactions. When Hae-mi disappears without explanation, the film shifts from a meditation on loneliness into something darker—an exploration of how power operates in silence, in glances, in the unspoken hierarchies that dictate who is seen and who is disposable.
The relationship between Jong-su, Hae-mi, and Ben is a study in shifting control. Hae-mi, vibrant yet vulnerable, exerts a fleeting dominance over Jong-su, drawing him into her orbit only to leave him stranded in her absence. Their intimacy is marked by hesitation—Jong-su’s hands hover uncertainly during their lovemaking, as if afraid to fully grasp what might slip away. And slip away she does, first to Africa, then into Ben’s world, where she becomes another object of his detached fascination. Ben, played with chilling precision by Steven Yeun, is the film’s most unsettling force. His wealth affords him an effortless authority, a way of occupying space that renders Jong-su’s existence small by comparison. He is polite, even charming, but his smiles never reach his eyes. When he casually mentions his habit of burning abandoned greenhouses—"plastic sheds that no one cares about"—the statement hangs in the air like a threat. Is it a confession, a metaphor, or simply another way for Ben to remind Jong-su of his own insignificance?
What makes Burning so compelling is how Lee Chang-dong refuses to reduce its tensions to simple villainy or victimhood. Ben’s cruelty is systemic, embedded in the way he moves through the world, rather than in any overt act of malice. In one haunting scene, Hae-mi recounts a transformative experience in Africa, her voice trembling with emotion, while Ben’s wealthy friends listen with polite, vacant smiles. Later, when another working-class girl takes Hae-mi’s place at one of his gatherings, the scene repeats with eerie similarity. The rich remain untouched; the poor are interchangeable. Jong-su, meanwhile, is left to navigate a world where his anger has no outlet, where even his attempts to assert himself—questioning Ben, searching for Hae-mi—are met with the indifferent shrug of a society that has already decided he doesn’t matter.
Beneath this class tension lies the film’s most haunting theme: the idea of hunger. Early on, Hae-mi tells Jong-su about the Bushmen’s distinction between "Little Hunger" (the need for food) and "Great Hunger" (the search for life’s meaning). For Jong-su and Hae-mi, both hungers go unmet. They are financially precarious, yes, but their deeper tragedy is their yearning for something beyond survival—a connection, a purpose, a way to be seen. Hae-mi’s nude dance at dusk, bathed in golden light, is one of the film’s most arresting moments precisely because it captures this longing. She is reaching for something ineffable, a moment of transcendence before the darkness reclaims her. Ben, by contrast, suffers from a different kind of hunger. His wealth has insulated him from material want, but it has also hollowed him out. His hobbies—burning greenhouses, collecting women—are the actions of a man trying to feel something in a world that has left him numb.
The film’s ambiguity is its greatest strength. Did Ben kill Hae-mi? The evidence is circumstantial, a collection of implications that Jong-su—and the audience—must piece together. But Burning is less interested in solving a crime than in exposing the conditions that make such crimes possible. The final act, in which Jong-su’s simmering rage erupts into violence, feels less like a resolution than an inevitability. In a society that grinds the powerless into dust, what else is left but fire?
By the time the credits roll, Burning has seared itself into the viewer’s mind. It is a film about invisibility, about the people society overlooks until they vanish entirely. It is about the quiet violence of privilege, the way a smile can be a weapon, the way a man like Ben can destroy lives without ever raising his voice. Most of all, it is about the hunger that never fades—the desperate, unfulfilled need for something more. Lee Chang-dong offers no easy answers, no cathartic justice. Instead, he leaves us with the image of Jong-su, naked and screaming in the snow, a man reduced to his most primal self. It is a cry of rage, of grief, of recognition: in a world that burns the disposable, sometimes the only answer is to burn back.