Propelled by the shocking images of a man eating a live octopus and beating countless combatants to death in a hallway with only a hammer, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy helped kick open the international doors for South Korean cinema in the 21st century. Upon its release 20 years ago, it became the center of a moment when the world began to give the country’s filmmakers their due; Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and made notable inroads at the U.S. box office. But it wasn’t the only South Korean film from 2003 to find success: Oldboy, Memories of Murder, and A Tale of Two Sisters were all released within a few months of each other — all three stylistically and narratively distinct but indelibly linked by international borders. Where any of them succeeded, the others were there to reward viewers looking to dive deeper into the nation’s films.
The subsequent 20 years, a period sometimes referred to as the “South Korean Film Renaissance,†have seen many breakthrough moments for South Korean films and shows. Whether it was the unexpected success of Squid Game or the unprecedented accolades of Parasite, the nation’s movies have given us dozens of reasons to dig deeper into them. Here are 20 South Korean films worth a couple hours of your streaming time, starting with Oldboy, which is now available in a stunning 4K restoration.
Oldboy
Year: 2003
Runtime: 2h
Director: Park Chan-wook
Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is kidnapped for reasons that are never explained to him. In the hotel room that has been converted into a prison, he discovers his wife has been murdered and he’s the primary suspect. That becomes a secondary concern, however, as he’s imprisoned for the next 15 years, fed through a dog door with no one to talk to. Just as mysteriously as he was taken, he’s released and finds he has five days to unravel the mystery of his imprisonment. That’s just the first act. The story barrels forward like a runaway train full of horrors that makes Oldboy a delightfully unique, almost unbearably brutal experience. It’s also just one-third of Park’s Vengeance trilogy — Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance are also excellent.
Memories of Murder
Year: 2003
Runtime: 2h 12m
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Bong Joon Ho’s early classic is a tense detective story with a muted palette that makes the detectives feel like they’re alone in a world gone mad. Two bumbling small-town police officers (Song Kang-ho and Kim Roe-ha) are joined by an officer from Seoul (Kim Sang-kyung) to investigate the ritualistic murder of women in a small South Korean town. Based on a true story of murders in the 1980s, Bong displays his mastery at balancing brutality and black humor, and eventually, the psychological damage of the murders takes its toll on both the audience and the characters. The world, Memories of Murder seems to say, cannot find a way to deal with the violent depravity it faces here.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Year: 2003
Runtime: 1h 54m
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Sisters Soo-mi (Lim Soon-jung) and Soo-yeon (Moon Geun-young) return to their countryside home after time spent in a psychiatric hospital. The idyllic setting is supposed to bring them peace, but confrontations with their stepmother (Yum Jung-ah) make that an unachievable goal. The sisters endure a series of mysterious incidents that become increasingly nightmarish as director Kim Jee-woon sprints toward a dark and unexpected conclusion. It’s a twisty film that has remained a touchstone in South Korean horror and has had a significant impact on filmmakers around the world: Jordan Peele had Lupita Nyong’o watch it before shooting Us.
The Host
Year: 2006
Runtime: 2h
Director: Bong Joon Ho
One of the great, underappreciated monster movies of the 21st century, The Host isn’t so much a horror film as a satire that manages to build impressive tension throughout. Yet, in the rich tradition of monster movies, there’s an allegory at the heart of the story of this slimy, tentacled, child-snatching monster living along the Han River. Gang Doo, played by Bong regular Song Kang-ho, leads his family on a mission to save his daughter from the clutches of the creature. Like Godzilla before it, the real monster at the heart of the film is humanity.
Secret Sunshine
Year: 2007
Runtime: 2h 22m
Director: Lee Chang-dong
Secret Sunshine is the kind of film that people call lyrical. That might be hard to define, but it’s a felt description more than anything and apt for Lee Chang-dong’s heart-wrenching film. Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) has decided to move to her husband’s homeland as a way of dealing with his death. When her son is kidnapped and murdered, she’s left to mourn the loss of everything she used to define herself, struggling to find meaning in the wake of such a stunning loss. Jeon gives a harrowing performance that earned her Best Actress at Cannes.
The Good the Bad the Weird
Year: 2008
Runtime: 2h 10m
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Park Chang-yi, a.k.a. the Finger Chopper (Lee Byung-hun), is hired to rob a Japanese official traveling by train in 1940s Manchuria. He’s ready to double-cross his employer and take a treasure map for himself, but a small-time thief and goofball (Song Kang-ho) gets there first and finds the map by accident. A bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung) after Chang-yi is also on the train. The sordid series of mishaps that starts the story turns into a race across the desert that is bloody, hilarious, and heavily stylized.
Mother
Year: 2009
Runtime: 2h 9m
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Mother, in many ways, was a predecessor to Bong’s future success with Parasite. It’s a slow-burning story about the murder of a teenage girl. Kim Hye-ja stars as the unnamed mother of an intellectually disabled boy suspected of the murder. She starts her own investigation into the crime, putting the terrifying depths of unconditional love on display. The mother’s investigation puts her in morally compromising situations where she makes decisions that leave viewers screaming at the screen. Kim’s nuanced performance turns a seemingly straightforward story into something that’ll leave nail marks in your palms.
Thirst
Year: 2009
Runtime: 2h 14m
Director: Park Chan-wook
Park’s foray into horror — somehow less horrifying than many of his non-horror films — produces a distinctively dark meditation on humanity. Song Kang-ho plays a depressed priest who begins to experience odd symptoms after volunteering to test a vaccine. He fears sunlight and has an overwhelming desire to feed on patients at the hospital where he attends to the dying. The changes aren’t just physiological, though. He falls in love with a childhood friend’s wife (Kim Ok-bin). This forbidden romance sets him on a dangerous path that unleashes something far worse than vampirism on the community.
Poetry
Year: 2010
Runtime: 2h 19m
Director: Lee Chang-dong
“Masterpiece†might not be too strong of a word for Lee Chang-dong’s 2010 film. On the surface, it’s a simple story: The melancholic film follows the elderly Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee), a caretaker who lives with her grandson. She is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and chooses to learn something new as she is faced with the terror of forgetting her own life. She joins a community learning poetry, learning to express herself as she loses a sense of self and even language itself. It’s a movie that revels in the subtlety of life, the joy of being alive, and the inevitable pains that are the price of that joy.
I Saw the Devil
Year: 2010
Runtime: 2h 24m
Director: Kim Jee-woon
There are a lot of revenge films here that follow in the wake of Oldboy, but something many share is a sense of futility — the sense that being consumed by revenge consumes you in the process. I Saw the Devil might be the subgenre’s violent apotheosis. An intelligence agent (Lee Byung-hun) hunts the person who brutally murdered his pregnant wife, with a desire to make sure that his just desserts are as barbarous as the violence he inflicted on others. It’s a brutal film that’s somehow also peppered with beautiful moments.
The Housemaid
Year: 2010
Runtime: 1h 47m
Director: Im Sang-soo
The Housemaid is a remake of a 1960 film of the same name, an iconic film of South Korea’s so-called golden age. Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon) slips into a treacherous love triangle while working as a housemaid for a wealthy family. Hae-ra (Woo Seo) discovers Eun-yi’s affair with her husband and considers murdering the maid or poisoning her and then forcing the maid into an abortion. Most critics agree that the remake doesn’t reach the erotic, disturbing heights of the classic, but it’s still a compelling thriller that ties the country’s early films to the Renaissance era.
Train to Busan
Year: 2016
Runtime: 1h 58m
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Train to Busan doesn’t reinvent the zombie genre, but it does it really, really well. Seok-woo (Gong Yoo), a workaholic absentee father, takes his daughter on a train to Busan so she can spend her birthday with her mother. A sick woman boards the train at the last minute, and chaos follows as more and more passengers turn into zombies and the train attempts to plow its way to Busan, where they believe a safe zone is waiting. The viscera-splattered film is kind of a Snowpiercer with zombies.
The Handmaiden
Year: 2016
Runtime: 2h 25m
Director: Park Chan-wook
The Handmaiden manages to, unexpectedly, be disquieting in a different way for Park. It’s a rich film that increasingly feels like a puzzle as it proceeds. It’s a knotty, sexual adaptation of Sarah Waters’s crime novel Fingersmith relocated to Japanese-occupied Korea. The con man Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) plans to marry and steal the inheritance of a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee). He hires a pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri) to become her maid and aid his plan. What follows is a series of double-crosses and subterfuge that runs almost impossibly deep.
The Fortress
Year: 2017
Runtime: 2h 20m
Director: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Less heralded internationally than many on this list — possibly because of a somewhat ham-fisted finale — The Fortress is a gorgeous 17th-century epic about King Injo (Park Hae-il) of Joseon (Korea) holed up in a fortress against an overwhelming Qing invasion. Between stunning cinematography and a moody, minimalist score by the legendary late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, it’s an emotional journey. Like most war epics, there’s a strong thread about sacrifice. Yet it approaches the topic with a distinctly modern sensibility, spending much of its run time debating who it is that must sacrifice and what it means to lead.
Burning
Year: 2018
Runtime: 2h 28m
Director: Lee Chang-dong
It was eight years between Poetry and Lee Chang-dong’s next film, a contemplative adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning.†Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) runs into an old childhood friend, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo). They hook up just before she takes a trip to Africa. Jong-su cat-sits for her, masturbating and thinking of her in her apartment. She returns to South Korea with Ben (Steven Yeun), a man she met during a harrowing experience abroad. As the three spend time together, Ben reveals that he has a disturbing hobby, and every moment of their time together is so loaded with tension, viewers are left wondering when and how the dam will burst.
Parasite
Year: 2019
Runtime: 2h 12m
Director: Bong Joon Ho
With his seventh feature, Bong Joon Ho made history. Parasite was the first non-English-language film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, forcing many Americans to overcome their fear of tiny words at the bottom of a screen. Bong demonstrates a masterful ability to build tension as the destitute Kim family gloms onto the wealthy Park family, slowly getting each family member a job in the Park household. Parasite oscillates from tragicomedy to thriller and back again, leaving no one unscarred by living in this world.
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil
Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 49m
Director: Lee Won-tae
This dark thriller is based on the true story of a serial killer, played by Kim Sung-kyu, striking out at random victims. The killer’s hallmark is rear-ending cars at night and stabbing the driver to death when they get out to assess the damage. However, he makes the mistake of rear-ending a mob boss played by Don Lee. Everyone is forced to compromise their values as a rogue cop (Kim Mu-yeol) works with the mob boss to hunt the killer. While they cooperate, there’s a race to find the mysterious killer, as their deal stipulates that whoever catches him gets to deal with him however they’d like.
Decision to Leave
Year: 2022
Runtime: 2h 19m
Director: Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook’s latest is arguably his most emotional film. It’s been compared to Basic Instinct, though you’d have to couch that by saying it’s Basic Instinct plus Park. An insomniac cop (Park Hae-il) investigates the death of a wealthy man whose wife, a Chinese immigrant named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), tops the list of suspects. The mystery is engrossing, but the heart of the film is the messy web of personal entanglement that develops between the two. It comes to a masterfully shocking ending that feels distinctively Park.
The Roundup
Year: 2022
Runtime: 1h 46m
Director: Lee Sang-yong
American audiences will recognize star Don Lee, who has crossed the Pacific in films like Marvel’s Eternals. The Roundup, the second film of the Crime City series, shows what Lee is best known for. He plays a gruff, aloof detective who discovers South Koreans taking up residence in Vietnam to commit violent crimes against South Korean tourists. While a tale of a cop taking the law into his own hands should, at a minimum, raise an eyebrow (and it does here), Lee is a powerful, mesmerizing vortex at the center of the film.
Past Lives
Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Celine Song
Past Lives is the impressive directorial debut from Celine Song. It follows the relationship of two childhood friends over the course of more than two decades. They grow apart in their relationship and are physically separated, living across the globe. They reconnect years later, but find that their lives can’t quite meet. After another stretch of time, they connect again and find themselves exploring what the distance between them has meant in a beautiful, emotionally challenging film that is semi-autobiographical for Song.