Robert Jackman

Beyond Squid Game: the Korean dramas worth watching

  • From Spectator Life
Squid Game (Netflix)

Quickly becoming Netflix’s most successful series ever (with an estimated 111 million viewers worldwide), Squid Game has turned the spotlight on Korea as a cultural hotspot.

That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s had half an eye on film reviews over the past years – with Korean films impressing both viewers and critics alike. Here are eight films and series worth watching, and where to catch them:

Moving On, Mubi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h26X-DHrpr8

Our own film critic was surprised by how gripped she became by Moving On: a quiet – and deliberately understated – film about a family (a single father and two children) whose economic circumstances force them to move in with an elderly, and near silent, relative. ‘Nothing happens, but everything happens,’ writes Deborah Ross in her review, alluding to the film’s magical ability to draw the audience into following the family’s every move. Over in the States, one reviewer – the Korea expert for the Roger Ebert website, nonetheless –proclaimed the film as the best to come out of Seoul in 2020. High praise indeed.

The Flower Girl, YouTube

For all its hermit kingdom status, the socialist republic of North Korea once had another image for its future: as the world’s next cinematic powerhouse. And after sixty years of DPRK film-making, no title holds as much ideological prestige – and perhaps even outside admiration – as The Flower Girl, a 1972 film adaptation of an opera reportedly written by the granddaddy of the revolution Kim Il-sung. Set during the 1930s, it tells the story of a young girl in the anti-Japanese guerilla movement and her brother in the Revolutionary Army – and in a brilliantly subversive twist it’s available for free on uber-capitalist YouTube.

Handmaiden, Netflix

Throughout the 2000s, cult favourite Park Chan-wook was best known for his stylish violent thrillers – with import DVDs of Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance passed around university campuses like contraband.

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