Top 5 Best Korean Movies to Watch on a first date

To commence your Korean date night, you might as well start big and bold, and this is the ideal choice. Critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, and taking top honors at the 2020 Academy Awards, Parasite is an incisive dissection of the Korean class system. The storyline contrasts the fortunes of one poverty-stricken family, the Kims, who inveigle themselves into the service of the obscenely wealthy Parks family by pretending to be highly qualified for the role. What unfolds is an intriguing film, part thriller, and part dark comedy.

Directed by Lee Chang-dong (the first Korean director to be Academy Award-nominated, for the best foreign feature for Burning in 2018), this film is entertaining and thought-provoking in equal measure. It features an elderly woman (Yoon Jeong-hee), who is struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s, who joins a poetry class. But she discovers her grandson participated in a terrible group sex assault of a female student, who took her own life as a result of the brutal incident. With her grasp of reality slipping away, she must confront the perpetrators and the girl’s family. This storyline will have you and your partner gripped on your first date.

When a stranger arrives in a remote location, the villagers succumb to an unknown epidemic that provokes them into violence. As this mysterious affliction grows worse, people begin murdering one another in various brutal ways. Directed by Na Hong-jin, the fantastical horror is anchored by strong central performances from Kawk Do-won as a detective, and Hwang Jung-min as a shaman hired to counter the sinister forces with his positive ‘magic.’ If you love horror, this unusual twist will keep you captivated, as the initial mistrust of an incomer evolves into a mystical tale of witches and demonic possession.

Since we mentioned Lee Chang-dong’s marvelous feature in the first review, we felt this should also feature in our top five! Burning is based on a short story by acclaimed Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The initial storyline is of a classic love triangle, involving a novelist (played by Yoo Ah-in), his childhood friend (Jeon Jong-seo), and a friend, Ben (played by Steven Yeun, a longtime cast member of the massively-popular The Walking Dead TV series). But the plot quickly becomes much more interwoven, involving complicated legal affairs, a mysterious missing cat, and erotic encounters.

Director Bong Joon-ho went on to direct the Oscar-winning Parasite, as well as the hit TV series Snowpiercer, but this earlier feature gave strong hints of the exceptional talent in the making. This science-fiction tale features a fantastical creature that emerges from the Han River to embark on a murderous killing spree. So much more engaging than stereotypical monster films, the plot unfolds with verve and inventiveness and certainly paved the way for the larger-scale films that were to earn Bong Joon-ho international acclaim. Upon its release, The Host became the highest-grossing Korean feature film of all time, selling 13 million tickets by the end of its first run (equivalent to one-quarter of South Korea’s population!)