"Burning" Review- 1.5/5 Stars

Genre: Drama, thriller, romance

Platform: Netflix

Rating: R

    I am no stranger to Korean entertainment, having binged many K-dramas in recent years. But the only Korean film I have seen is Wish You, which was mediocre, although I enjoyed seeing an onscreen gay love story emerge from the conservative country. Over the past several years, coinciding with the hallyu wave, films from South Korea have been gaining international recognition and popularity. 2019's Parasite won an astounding four Oscars, and 2016's Train to Busan received a positive enough response to have a sequel greenlit. Both of these films are on my watchlist, but I want to fully enjoy them, and have not had the time to commit to watching them yet.

    Upon finishing Hellbound a few weeks ago, I looked up the series online and read about the plot, actors, and rumoured second season. I stumbled across a profile of actor Yoo Ah-in, who played Jinsu (one of my favourite characters) on the show. The article said Yoo starred in a film titled Burning, so I watched the film's trailer. It was simple and bleak, with barely any scenes from the movie and mostly quotes from reviews describing how incredible the movie was. I figured that, if it was so well-loved, it must be amazing, right?

    Wrong. I found Burning on Netflix and decided to watch it last Saturday night. In my mind, I had added it to my "Triad of Internationally-Acclaimed Korean Movies", along with Parasite and Train to Busan. I don't like long movies, so two hours and twenty-eight minutes was a commitment for me, but I had high expectations for this movie and hoped it would be worth my time.

    But Burning left me utterly disappointed, to say the least. I did not know any plot details going in, and since the trailer does not show viewers much, all I knew was that one of the characters burned greenhouses. It was portrayed in the trailer as an important, thrilling detail that would be a catalyst for the plot. But the greenhouse arsons were barely mentioned and insignificant.

    I enjoyed the first bit of the movie, where Jong-su and Hae-mi reunite and start to like each other. It was slow, but interesting enough, and I believed it was a set-up for a cute-but-messy romance movie. I could not have been more wrong. Hae-mi runs off to Africa, telling Jong-su to look after her "cat". The concept of the cat was something that made absolutely no sense to me. Does the cat actually exist, or is Hae-mi imagining it? This is never made clear. And the scenes where Jong-su goes to the apartment to feed the cat, and then looks out the window and masturbates are very confusing and unnecessary. There is no significance to the plot, and frankly, they grossed me out.

    About an hour into the film, I was bored. When was the plot going to begin? I expected some elements of a thriller, some crime, maybe a mystery or two. By the middle of the film, I was waiting for the story to begin, but it never did. The scene where *SPOILER* Jong-su reveals his crush on Hae-mi and Ben reveals his pyromaniac tendencies, I was thinking, "Okay, we're finally going to get some tension! Romantic rivalry! Crime!" But again, none of those things went anywhere.

    The scene where Hae-mi takes her shirt off and dances around for a solid two or three minutes left me very confused. Is this symbolic in some way? Why did she do this? What were the men's reactions? This, along with many, many other scenes, feels utterly pointless and does not contribute in any way to the "plot" of the movie.

    Aside from Jong-su and Hae-mi's initial reunion, the only mildly interesting part of Burning is the last half hour, when Jong-su realizes that he has not seen his crush in a while. He asks a few people if they have seen her, and that is it. There is no sense of urgency or emotion in his investigation, no panicked searching or frantic calls to the police. It feels unrealistic and meaningless. Hae-mi's disappearance sparks a bit of uneasiness between Jong-su and Ben, although neither of them seem all that concerned that their mutual crush has vanished. Ben hosts a dinner party, which Jong-su begrudgingly attends for some reason.

    What bothers me the most about this film is that it creates far more questions than answers. There is minimal dialogue, so some things occur onscreen or are mentioned, but never thoroughly explained or discussed later on. I was left with many unanswered questions, most of which seem pretty important and should have been major plot points. *SPOILERS* Where did Hae-mi go? Does Ben really kill her? How does Jong-su know Ben did it? Is that why he kills Ben? Why not keep Ben alive for information on where Hae-mi is being held or where her remains are? If these elements were played up properly, they would have made Burning a riveting murder mystery thriller, something I expected it to be. But these plot details, like Burning itself, fall flat.

    Also, what do the greenhouses have to do with anything? In the trailer, it appears to be a major plot point, and the film is titled Burning, after all. I expected Ben's hobby of setting greenhouses on fire to be an indicator of his psychopathy or further criminal tendencies. Based on the title, I thought the arsons would have a significant contribution to the overall mystery and plot. But they don't. Ben mentions them once, and then him and Jong-su have an obscure discussion where Jong-su confronts 

him for not burning one down near his (Jong-su's) farm. And that's it. For something mentioned in the movie's title, I thought Ben's pyromania would be just that. Mania. I expected, hoped, that he would be some twisted serial arsonist and killer, so that the movie would actually be interesting. But the topic of burning greenhouses, like everything else mentioned in the film, is fleeting and has no importance whatsoever.

     After I had suffered through all two and a half hours of Burning, all I could think was, "am I missing something?" For a movie that was advertised to be popular, thought-provoking, and riveting, I found it to have minimal plot and no significant meaning to me as a viewer. It was extremely boring and almost put me to sleep. Most of the film is scenery shots, character shots, or, occasionally, people discussing unimportant details. There is absolutely nothing riveting, thrilling, or even mildly entertaining about Burning. In my opinion, it is an unnecessarily long film with no plot or actual scenes. If I am going to commit to a long movie, I want it to be worth my time. I want it to be scary, thought-provoking, and edge-of-your-seat exciting. But Burning is none of these things. In my opinion, it was a waste of my Saturday night, and I would have been better off watching absolutely anything else. If it was up to me, the title would have been Boring instead of Burning.

*Yes, after doing some Googling, I found that other reviewers have said that Burning is supposed to be a deep film about social issues like capitalism and misogyny. But I am someone who cares a great deal about social issues, and did not pick up on one ounce of life lessons or societal warnings in this movie. Anything that the writer or director intended to be deep went way over my head, and I did not find this film to be meaningful at all.

A shot from the film Burning