"Burning" has been on my mind ever since I saw it a years ago—and I've been yearning for a film like this ever since, but honestly there's nothing like it. It's smart. It doesn't cry out for you to spot little things and expect praise. It's just so minimal yet liminal. Burning is a mostly slow and subtle film but when it hits it hits hard. It often follows the protagonist in his seemingly mundane daily routine and very little information is revealed about the few characters involved. It's amazing, almost like magic, how this film keeps the mystery of a story so close to us. It's hard to describe the feeling it gives off after i watch it. It's like seeing an optical illusion. The theme of seeing what is not there is what underlies the story of this film. We can get clues about this from the scene where Hae-mi mimes eating oranges in front of Jong-su who gapes at the beginning of the story. It's so realistic, Jong-su can feel the sweetness of the oranges Hae-mi is eating, but there aren't really any oranges there. This film confuses, grips us tightly, makes us miserable by our own bad thoughts, it's so good and entertaining in its own way. The events in this film are intended to be a mystery, open to the interpretation of each viewer, how each of us sees things. The uncertainty of what really happened is the film's main strength.

Burning is not like a traditional (Hollywood) thriller where clue after clue is dropped one after another, nor is it one where you are certain of what the end goal is. The extra-diegetic music is not used as a device to necessarily excite, but more as a way to help build tension and a mild anxiety. It is a quiet film filled with lonely characters. Because of that, I can’t recommend it to people who are looking for the traditional thriller because this film isn’t that – it offers more of a study on the characters, their surroundings