Three-time Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho has received widespread acclaim. Here’s a list of all the director’s movies ranked from worst to best.
Bong Joon-ho was making cinematic waves, both in Korea and across the globe, long before Parasite became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Cinephiles will cite his roots in indie cinema, and his propensity for shifting between genres throughout his career, as proof that Bong has long been operating at a high level, ever since his first feature debuted almost two-and-a-half decades ago. I’ve listed all of Bong’s previous movies here, most of which remain some of the best Korean films ever made, ranked from worst to best.
7. Barking Dogs Never Bite
Bong’s first movie, Barking Dogs Never Bite, saw the filmmaker at his most outwardly comedic. Lee Sung-jae plays an out-of-work professor, Go Yoon-joo, who is driven to violence by the incessant yapping of a dog somewhere in his apartment complex. Frustrated by his strained marriage and an unfulfilling career, Go seeks to silence the pesky pooch, while maintenance worker Park Hyun-nam (Bae Doona), who witnesses one of Go’s attempts at canine murder from afar, races to uncover his identity.
Barking Dogs Never Bite features many hallmarks that would come to define the work of director Bong: dark and offbeat humour, multifaceted storytelling, and an underlying current of thematic social commentary are all evidently present. Bong has often returned to the well of human horror, exploring the lengths people will go to benefit themselves or exploit others, and the genesis of that recurring theme can be traced back to this indie debut.
6. Mother
Bong’s fourth feature, Mother, is a powerful and devastating demonstration of unconditional love – the kind of fervent love that slowly erodes morality, leaving behind only the shattered pieces of the characters we once knew. Kim Hye-ja commands the spotlight as the titular mother, a meek herbalist and unlicensed acupuncturist, whose simple life is turned on its head when her love-smothered son, with unspecific but evident developmental issues, is arrested on suspicion of murdering a young girl.
Mother hinges on the captivating, whirlwind performance of Kim, who suffers one emotional devastation after the next in her dogged pursuit of evidence that will exonerate her only child. Bong drowns the film in bleak melodrama, challenging audience expectations at every turn. He creates a foreboding atmosphere and refuses to show any glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, channelling his obsession with class division into a provocative neo-noir mystery that lingers long after the cards all are laid bare. It’s slow and methodical, lacking the fervour and zeal of Bong’s greater accomplishments, but it’s perhaps the strongest example of a tour-de-force performance-led piece in his highly regarded body of work.
5. Snowpiercer
Perhaps Bong’s most commercially accessible movie to Western audiences at the time, Snowpiercer marked a hard turn into science fiction from the filmmaker. Set in a dystopian future, the story takes place nearly two decades after a failed attempt to halt global warming inadvertently led to a new ice age, with the surviving members of humanity crammed inside a single train, powered by a perpetual-motion engine and governed by a strict caste system. Chris Evans stars as Curtis, the de facto leader of the tail passengers, poor people living in cramped and squalid conditions who spark a revolution and fight to reach the front of the train.
An adaptation of climate fiction novel “Le Transperceneige”, Snowpiercer wears its sociopolitical themes proudly. Bong conjures up another bleak world, this one filled with desperation and bloodthirsty violence, allowing the film to exist both as a cutting thematic study of class warfare and as a thrilling sci-fi action spectacle. Several twists are weaved into the storytelling masterfully, and the emotional moments connect in the downtime between each murderous encounter. It’s an immaculately conceived piece of exhilarating and thoughtful filmmaking, and it fortunately served as the launching point for many to discover more of Bong’s exceptional work.
4. Okja
It’s not the easiest task to succinctly describe the plot of Okja, but in its simplest form, the film tells the story of a young girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) who relentlessly tracks down and attempts to rescue her pet “super pig” Okja. After being genetically bred by the nefarious Mirando Corporation and gifted to Mija’s farmer grandfather ten years prior, Okja is taken to New York City where the company plans to publicly name her the “best super pig”. Okja swings for the fences right from the off, instantly becoming Bong’s most ambitious film by its concept alone, but also because of the erratic tone and the eccentric performances provided by Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Okja is further proof that Bong’s movies cannot be pigeonholed: in one moment, it’s a comedic action romp, in another, it’s a fantastical melodrama, and finally, it’s an extremely harrowing takedown of capitalism and the exploitation of animals for human gain. Okja is presented as a modern-day fable, resembling the closest thing we have to a live-action Hayao Miyazaki film, and it’s beautiful and brutal in equal measure.
3. The Host
Famously lauded by Quentin Tarantino as a “creepy and lovable” favourite, The Host was an immediate hit in Korea, where it remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Inspired by a real-life public health crisis from 2000, when an American man ordered mortician employees to dump hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River, The Host is a family drama masquerading as a monster movie. Frequent Bong Joon-ho collaborator Song Kang-ho plays a slow-witted father who witnesses his young daughter being taken into the river, after a mutated fish-like monster massacres civilians in a riverside Seoul park. Song and his family refuse to accept his daughter’s fate and strive to rescue teenage Park Hyun-seo from the city’s sewer system.
The Host impressively balances several genres, most closely resembling sci-fi horror B-movies while propping up the monster thrills with rich characters and compelling family dynamics. Bong flagrantly disregards common monster movie conventions, turning a would-be drama into a very human horror that’s bolder and more ambitious than its Western contemporaries. Characters are forced to contend with a large and dangerous creature, but also the very real fear of losing a loved one, and that’s horrifying on its own. There’s political messaging subtly (and sometimes unsubtly, Agent Yellow) weaved throughout, but at its core, the film is about a family unit that just won’t quit on each other, and that familial depth elevates The Host as something worthy of greater recognition.
2. Memories of Murder
Korea’s answer to David Fincher’s Se7en and a precursor to subsequent crime thriller classic Zodiac, Memories of Murder is a mesmerising and remarkably impressive movie that somehow manages to delicately balance Bong’s signature dark humour with the crushing sadness and anger infused throughout the story. Song Kang-ho and Seo Tae-yoon are two detectives who investigate a string of grotesque murders of women in a rural town; the former is a local cop untrained and ill-equipped to handle such a situation and the latter is a hotshot detective brought in from Seoul. Based on the real Hwaesong murders, the film is a bleak examination of criminal investigation, with the detectives progressively becoming more desperate and emotionally strained as their attempts to identify the killer continue to turn up dead ends.
Described by many critics as Bong’s masterpiece, Memories of Murder is both a technical and narrative marvel. Apart from a few sparse scenes that bookend the movie, Memories of Murder is drained of its saturation, creating a washed-out colour palette that deepens the characters’ sorrow and amplifies the futility of their investigation. Both Song and Seo turn in sublime performances, neither of which proves too flashy but each is visibly shaken by every murdered girl they must witness, and the fallout that shatters the community around them. Bong’s sophomore film is his darkest and most haunting, but it’s also beautifully brought together with devastating impact. It would be a worthy #1 on any filmmaker’s ranked list, if not for his true crowning accomplishment.
1. Parasite
If placing Parasite in the top spot seems the obvious move, that truly isn’t the case, such is the strength of the argument for Memories of Murder. But Bong’s most recent film (writing before the release of Mickey 17) received universal acclaim for a justifiable reason: it’s a new classic, with the already accomplished filmmaker operating at his zenith. Parasite has the audience follow the plight of a desperate Seoul family in an extremely difficult financial situation: they are forced to partake in underhanded practices and deception to survive, leeching off an upper-class family who are dismissive and critical of the lower class. Perhaps Bong’s most outwardly comedic film since Barking Dogs Never Bite, Parasite is, at once, a black comedy and a quasi-horror movie, tonally flipping on a dime at precisely the midway point. It becomes a nail-biting thriller, populated by bouts of explosive violence and palpable tension, enhanced by rich, layered, sociopolitical connotations.
Class division has long been the cornerstone of Bong’s work, and Parasite continues that trend by taking two radically different families, each plucked from varying corners of Korean society, and forcing them to intersect. Bong veteran Song Kang-ho leads the charge as the Kim family patriarch but truly the film is a murderers’ row of acting calibre: an ensemble piece where every performer steals the spotlight in turn. Parasite progressively peels away layer upon layer, prompting us to constantly reevaluate how we perceive both families, with the ambiguous meaning of the title playing into that messaging. But these performances only complement the genius of the material, which was co-written by Bong and Han Jin-won. It’s an electrifying satire of class politics, asking questions of capitalism and the societal barriers that separate those who have and those who don’t, and it’s truly the work of a master storyteller.
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