One of the Best Thrillers on Netflix May Just Break You

Lee Chang-dong‘s 2018 thrillerBurning is definitely not an easy watch. Don’t get us wrong here: it is an amazing movie from start to finish, and one that flows with almost no lulls thanks to its constantly tense atmosphere. However, with a considerable dose of melancholy, the film is also one of those inward journeys in which we are left to ponder about the meaning of our own lives. And, to make matters just a little bit worse, we may not like what we see within ourselves. That’s because, with its story about a lower-class aspiring writer and an upper-class bon vivant brought together by a joined romantic interest – though romantic might be a strong word here -, Burning isn’t the kind of movie that allows you to watch its plot from the sidelines, witnessing a life that isn’t your own. Instead, Lee Chang-dong demands your identification with at least one of its characters, and the end result sure is a downer, though a pretty exciting one.

Based on the short story Barn Burning by prolific Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Burning was a favorite of its year at Cannes, as well as South Korea’s pick for the Foreign Language category, now dubbed Best International Feature Film, at the 2019 Academy Awards. Unfortunately, it did not make the cut, losing to Lebanon’s Capernaum, Poland’s Cold War, Germany’s Never Look Away, Japan’s Shoplifters, and, of course, the winner, Mexico’s Roma. Upon watching the movie, though, one quickly has the feeling that perhaps the Academy has made one of its many mistakes. Beautiful, engaging, and reflexive, Burning is an easy addition to any best of 2018 list. However, one has to walk into this one warned that they might finish the experience with their mind completely in shambles.

What Is ‘Burning’ About?

Not because Burning is a particularly twisty thriller, far from it. The movie does have its unexpected turn of events, and its mind-bending ending leaves a lot up for interpretation, but, overall, it is pretty much straightforward. Burning has as its two main characters, Lee Jong-su (the amazing Yoo Ah-in), a delivery guy with dreams of becoming an author, and Ben (Steven Yeun in one of his best roles), a much better off, mysterious man that one day reveals that he burns empty, abandoned greenhouses as a hobby. The two stumble into each other’s lives via Shin Hae-mi (equally superb Jeon Jeong-seo), a former childhood friend of Jong-su that he is now in love with. However, after a brief, torrid afternoon with Jong-su, Hae-mi returns from a trip to Africa wrapped around Ben’s arms. Trapped as a third wheel, Jong-su develops a kind of obsessive and progressively tenser relationship with Ben – a relationship that only gets more complicated after Hae-mi disappears just around the time that Ben is planning to burn another greenhouse.

Now, Jong-su lives in an area surrounded by little abandoned greenhouses. Forced to move back in with his dad, who is facing some pretty heavy legal troubles, he leaves the big city for the countryside, just inches away from North Korea. It’s a region in which people raise cattle and grow plants in enclosed spaces to protect them from the cold. It is also a region that has been largely abandoned, with many of its former inhabitants moving to the big city in search of other opportunities. Thus, when Ben drops by Jong-su’s place for a visit with Hae-mi, he confesses that he’s actually scouting the area, looking for a new greenhouse to burn. The next one, he tells Jong-su, will be pretty close by, so he would be smart to keep an eye out.

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There’s more than a bit of red on them.

Jong-su asks Ben if he’s not afraid of getting in trouble for his little hobby. It’s a naive question, for sure. First and foremost, Ben is rich, and, thus, unlike Jong-su’s father, is largely above the law. Besides, Ben tells Jong-su, South Korea is full of abandoned greenhouses that no one cares about. Ugly, displeasing little things that many would like to see gone. And, so, Jong-su spends the next days of his life looking for burned greenhouses around his place only to find none. He also despairs over the whereabouts of Hae-mi, who has completely vanished, much like an abandoned greenhouse swallowed by the flames.

Now, an extended synopsis of Burning is already enough to make the prospective viewer understand that, when Ben talks about burning abandoned greenhouses, he’s not literally talking about greenhouses. Or maybe he is, but the movie doesn’t want us to interpret it that way. Once full of life, but now lonely and depressed, Hae-mi is an abandoned greenhouse through and through. She’s the one that Ben is currently burning through, and, later in the movie, we see him doing the exact same thing to another woman. The m.o. is the same: he finds someone much poorer than himself, a social outcast, brings her into his life, introduces her to his constantly derisive friends, and then… Well, then is exactly where the mystery of the movie lies.

What Happens to Hae-mi Drives the Plot of ‘Burning’

Slowly, but surely, Jong-su becomes convinced that Ben has killed Hae-mi, and that murdering vulnerable young women is what he means by burning abandoned greenhouses. A few pieces of evidence seem to point to him being in the right direction. Ben has a drawer full of cheap jewelry in his house, a drawer in which Jong-su eventually finds the plastic watch that he once gifted Hae-mi as a joke. During that same visit to Ben’s lavish apartment, Jong-su also discovers that he now has a cat – a cat that answers by the name of Boil, the same one that Hae-mi had given to her elusive pet. Finally, one day, while looking for a burned-down greenhouse, he sees Ben standing near a lake, gazing at the horizon. Could this have been the lake into which he threw Hae-mi’s “burned down” body?

Yes, everything points to Ben being a cold-blooded serial killer. Except not really. Hae-mi has left her affairs in order before disappearing, her apartment uncharacteristically tidy. The watch that Jong-su finds in Ben’s drawer, he also sees around the wrist of one of Hae-mi’s former co-workers. Said co-worker also explains to Jong-su that many people disappear to avoid credit card collectors, and, shortly after, Jong-su learns from Hae-mi’s mother and sister that she has a large debt on her back. Finally, there’s the cat. Jong-su has never seen Hae-mi’s cat, who would hide whenever strangers were around. He’s not even sure that she had a cat, and Hae-mi’s landlady assures him that no pets are allowed in their building. So is Ben’s new cat truly Hae-mi’s? Or is it just a coincidence that he ran towards Jong-su when he called him Boil?

Among all these questions, one thing is for certain: Jong-su has developed an unhealthy obsession with Ben. He cannot shake the feeling that he is the one responsible for Hae-mi’s disappearance, but, to be fair, Ben makes him uneasy from the get-go. His wealth makes Jong-su feel uncomfortable, and his weird remarks about never having cried in his life only add to the uncertainty surrounding him. Sure, he is weird and too rich for his own good, but Jong-su has also done enough to drive Hae-mi away from him. Despite claiming to be in love with her, he shames her for taking her top off in front of him and Ben while high, and he fails to understand just how much his friendship actually means to her. From a certain angle, it might look like he’s a man on the tracks of a seriously dangerous murderer, but, from another, he’s just a guy looking for a scapegoat for the results of his own mistakes.

‘Burning’ Asks You to Choose Between Jong-su and Ben

In this scenario, you, the viewer, are forced to choose what kind of story you are actually following. And, in doing so, you are also forced to make a choice between siding with Ben or with Jong-su. This becomes particularly clear when the movie ends, its final scene showing Jong-su luring Ben to a remote location and stabbing him multiple times. Jong-su then proceeds to shove Ben into his Porsche alongside his bloody clothes and sets fire to it. It’s this ending that eventually breaks you, for it all hinges on how you perceive it. If you think that Jong-su is doing the right thing, then you have to buy his whole paranoia, his spiral into madness, and agree that killing Ben based on a hunch or on a refusal to accept your own failures might be the right thing to do to stop a killer that might not actually have done any killing. But if you’re with Ben, well, then does it mean that you’re okay with his burning through people as if they are abandoned greenhouses, no matter what that burning might eventually entail?

There is also a third possibility there. Right before we see Jong-su killing Ben, we are shown an image of him sitting in his Seoul apartment, writing something on his computer right after his father’s trial. Perhaps that ending was nothing but a kind of poetic justice served in the form of the novel that he finally managed to write. Perhaps the whole thing about Ben being a serial killer was all in Jong-su’s imagination. Perhaps there was no drawer and no lost gazes by a lake. But, if that’s the case, what does that make of Jong-su’s relationship with Hae-mi? Did he just turn his troubled childhood friend into a victim in a story that will further his own career?

In the end, in the class warfare microcosm that is Burning, there is no such thing as real justice. We are all burning through people to get along. Well, maybe not all of us: Hae-mi isn’t burning through anyone. She’s merely a victim in whatever kind of narrative Ben and Jong-su have cooked up for themselves. In the scene where Jong-su is talking to Hae-mi’s co-worker about her disappearance, the woman complains about how women have to spend so much money on things like make-up and plastic surgery to be accepted in society. There is, she says, no place for women in this world. Perhaps this is the real answer to Burning‘s conundrum. Maybe Hae-mi was doomed from the start because of her gender. Doomed to be a victim of a vicious serial killer, a girl in a long line of conquests for a rich bon vivant, a character in someone else’s book. These endings are different, but they’re all tragic. There is simply no way out.

Burning is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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