After an eight year hiatus, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong returns to cinema with BURNING: a slow yet methodical mystery thriller adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami.

Jong-soo (Yoo Ah-in), a country boy from the vastly rural area of Paju, is aspiring to be a writer. He openly admires American authors William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and after having just graduated, he now lives in Seoul with no obvious prospects.

We meet him in the film’s opening sequences, running casual errands when he stumbles across Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), a young woman doing a department-store lottery. Learning they once knew each other as children, having grown up in the same neighbourhood, Haemi persuades Jong-soo to look after her cat whilst she makes a trip to Africa.

However, when Haemi returns she is accompanied by Ben (Steven Yeun), a rich, handsome young man, who seems to have it all. He drives a Porsche, lives in a stylish apartment located in the wealthy distract of Gangnam, and holds fancy dinner parties for his many friends. Needless to say, Jong-soo feels completely intimidated by Ben’s arrival. It is only when they start to get to know each other that Ben finally opens up to Jong-soo about his own secret hobby…

BURNING sees the arrival of new comers Yoo Ah-in and Jeon Jong-seo to the world of acting, along with American Korean actor Steven Yeun’s debut in Korean cinema. However, despite their collective inexperience, coupled with a lengthy run-time of two hours and twenty-eight mins, the trio unabashedly take to the screen delivering complex, multifaceted performances, which both engage and command the utmost attention from their audience.

Having just been tipped by fellow director Hirokazu Kore-eda at Cannes, BURNING was a close competitor for this year’s Palme d’Or, and this comes as no surprise. It is at once highly stylised and beautifully poetic, featuring exquisite cinematography and an electric soundtrack. One recalls Haemi’s dancing black silhouette contrasted against sultry orange sunsets and fiery skies, to the moody jazz sounds of Miles Davis’ ‘Ascenseur Pour L’échafaud’. As a result, whether or not you felt its conclusion predictable, or its pace a little too sedated, BURNING’s aesthetic and sound, along with its stellar and engaging performances, is both soulful and hypnotic.

It is an undeniably strange and discursive film, meandering leisurely through various themes of obsessive love and toxic male envy. However, what is fair and definite to say, is that BURNING promises to be left firmly singed into your memory long after the screening has finished.