Review of Joint Security Area / 공동경비구역 JSA, directed by Park Chan-wook

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

One of the series I’ve been working on for the past few months is going back to all of the movies I’ve watched throughout the years and revising the writing and reviews I never published. I always was cranking out little reviews even before I started doing this professionally as a job, so coming back has been a fun time to all of these movies.

My love affair with Korean cinema back when I was eighteen. I had just returned from studying abroad in South Korea, and I enrolled in a Contemporary Korean Cinema course at the college I was beginning. I was the only first semester student in the class, as I had AP credits that enabled me to be in there, and I remember being awed by all of the movies I was seeing on the screen.

I ended up going to see the US premiere of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, and from there I started running with the kinds of Korean movies I was picking up on streaming platforms and through my university. I ended up becoming a film critic after that and watching so many more Korean movies and chatting with the actors.

Joint Security Area was one of the movies I watched in college and wrote notes about, which is where this blog post comes from. Let’s get into the review!

Drama ensues at the border of North and South Korea, leading to an investigation after a shooting.

The beginning of this movie is an immediate spark to South and North Korean tensions: two soldiers, from North Korea, are killed at the DMZ. One South Korea sergeant, Lee Soo-hyeok, is wounded and tries to get back onto his country’s land, but gunfire breaks out. He manages to get out just in time, but tensions are now at an all-time high between the two nations.

Major Sophie E. Jean from Switzerland is sent to investigate from a committee of neutral nations, and she visits Soo-hyeok to get his account of the events. He’s claiming he gunned down the soldiers, but then Sophie realizes both nations have conflicting accounts on what exactly happened here. The South is saying Soo-hyeok was kidnapped and escaped, killing the soldiers and leaving one alive.

The North Korea, Kyeong-pil, tells Sophie that he came into the house with the North Koreans and opened fire. Sophie goes to the autopsy resorts of the North Koreans, which suggests one of them was shot so many times that it implied there was a revenge or grudge motive for this. The soldier who witnessed the event also tries to commit suicide, and Sophie notices that Kyeong-pil and Soo-hyeok have strange reactions that imply they are friends.

We learn through flashbacks that Soo-hyeok got lost and ended up in North Korean territory by accident before this event. The North Koreans found him and helped Soo-hyeok get back to the South, and the soldiers continued to communicate with each other by chucking messages over the border. Soo-hyeok does end up going over the border to meet his new friends, and they refuse to talk about politics to not taint what they have.

It’s when they go to the North to celebrate Woo-jin’s birthday that a North Korean commander discovers them there, leading to everyone in a standoff with guns drawn. Kyeong-pil defuses the situation, but then Sung-sik shoots the commander when he goes for his radio. Woo-jin is then shot dead by Sung-sik, and Kyeong-pil is forced to kill the other officer and tells the other two to flee.

He makes up the kidnapping situation and gets rid of the evidence Woo-jin had be socializing with Southerners, and Soo-hyeok shoots Kyeong-pil in the shoulder to make it seem like there was a struggle. Sung-sik gets across the border without being spotted, but Soo-hyeok is caught because he was wounded.

The case continues in the present day. Sophie is removed from it due to familial ties to North Korea, and the men tell her the truth. Kyeong-pil also tells her he saw Soo-hyeok actually kill Woo-jin, and Soo-hyeok kills himself because of what happened. We then see a photo taken of all four of them at the JSA taken by a tourist before the incident happened.

Overall Thoughts

I always find movies about North and South Korean relations to be fascinating, and Joint Security Area came out at such an interesting time too. It was released in 2000, and it shows a certain maturity from Park’s work even before he created the movies he was most famous for.

In some ways, I prefer this movie over the Vengeance trilogy that brought him acclaim in the West. The sophistication of this script shows that Park was thinking deeply about his characters and their motives, and the writing itself is fantastic throughout the film. It’s not perfect, that’s for sure, but it has a lot of heart.

I don’t think we see such a level of sophistication without extreme violence until Thirst. I like the Vengeance Trilogy, but I feel like people chalk it up to the violence, which is a very calculated form of lashing out for all of the protagonists.

All of this is to say go watch the film if you haven’t already. Cinema is meant to be watched, not read about.

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