Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) has his own problems. His father's anger disorder has lended him in jail and Jong-su has to go and look after the cattle on the farm. That's just in time for him to meet the beautiful, young and volatile Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo) spruiking outside a market stall. She recognises him from their country childhood and their mutual attraction burns through them through lunch and then a visit to her Gangnam apartment in Seoul. She flies off to Africa in search of answers to big existential questions while he looks after a cat in her apartment who seems to use the litter tray and eat its food without ever turning up. She comes back with Ben (Steven Yuen) on her arm .. Ok, I've already been through this.
But the thing is that while the lines for an intrigue are clear and the plot, when really needed, heats up to an expert level, we are not here for the plot as much as the title. Jong-su burns with ennui. He wants to be a writer but is finding it hard to get started. He burns with lust and then love for Hae-mi. He burns with envy at the lifestyle of the irritatingly serene self-possession of the well to do Ben. And he burns with rage at Ben's skills at enchanting Hae-mi with so little effort. And he burns at Ben's admission of arson as a hobby. And he burns with frustration at the crappy hand that the universe has dealt him before passing all the good cards on to every single other person alive.
The strength of this film is that he doesn't get to Brando this. If he does have a talent it's one of appearing aloof as all of the above sear his being's core from within. If circumstances have ever pressed you into a lip biting silence you will not sit easily through this film and you will not find its heavily extended running time a bore: you will be too busy feeling triggered. And the film will go on and on squeezing the damn thing. The sheer beauty of the lensing of the Korean often worrying music score aren't there to lull you into a nana nap. You have to do some burning of your own.
Yoo Ah-in compels us to watch him thread an emotional needle over and over again until he has the pieces of information to build a picture of a crime that he will not be able to tolerate like everything else. If we begin to understand that he will act we begin to worry at how forcibly he will (assuming the pressure breaks him at all). That's the strength of his performance. Jung Jong-seo's Hae-mi makes us fall for her along with Jong-su by playing the hazardous line between vivacious whimsy and crazy. Steven Yuen, plays completely against type (the heroic Glenn in Walking Dead) in his native Korean and needs us to doubt what we suspect by showing us some of the everyday persona he maintains to keep himself as sociable and successful as he is: is he too shallow to be real, is his smoothness really just what he is?
This is a character investigation rather than a thriller and will not be for anyone who likes their vengeance served cold and fast. If, on the other hand, you have ever liked how Kiyoshi Kurosawa handled his supernatural horror tales like kitchen sink realism or how Tarkovsky put the philosophy before the technology in Solaris to intensify the gut punch of its ending, this might well be for you. You might just like how not every feature film made today has to fall into genre lines and play nice. This is a big ask of a film but I'm glad it was made.
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