With “Mickey 17” hitting theaters this weekend, it’s the perfect time to look back on (and rank!) Bong Joon Ho’s incredible filmography. I was first introduced to Bong’s movies through “The Host,” his 2006 monster hit that brilliantly showcases his talent for sliding past the normal boundaries of genre and style. IE, It’s a kaiju monster movie, a melodramatic family drama, a zany slapstick satire, and a propulsive action thriller. At 15, I hadn’t seen anything like it. Unlike the familiar points of reference from my childhood, the “Jurassic Parks” or “Godzillas,” Bong jumped effortlessly between tones, from horror to farce to sweetly sincere and back again –– only adding to the exhilaration of discovering something new. For fussy teens, it became a movie my buddy and I rewatched often, making it a new favorite.
I next heard of Bong Joon Ho in a SkyMovies introduction by Quentin Tarantino, giving his twenty favorite movies from 1992-2009, listing Bong’s masterpiece “Memories of Murder,” about a years-spanning obsessive hunt for one of South Korea’s first serial killers, as among those favorites. (He also includes “The Host”). I instantly sought it out, and it was after seeing those two films and his recently released mystery film “Mother” that I realized I was watching the work of a master filmmaker. Between Bong and Park Chan-wook with “Oldboy” and “The Vengeance Trilogy,” I excitedly realized that the New Korean Cinema was an unmissable film movement, with Bong as one of the figureheads.
Working off limited budgets, Bong’s carefully storyboarded films have an acute intuition of what’s necessary to show and what isn’t, with a commanding sense of visual storytelling that rivals any filmmaker alive today. His filmmaking philosophy is extremely rare in Hollywood: every image counts. It became addictive to study his shots, which, unlike the studio films I’d been used to, usually unfold in long takes, focus on master shots of carefully blocked groups, and energy comes from sudden bursts of action in-frame to pay off that build-up. To my younger self, watching “Memories Of Murder” or “Mother” was an education of what was possible in film, blending technical craft with darker and politically probing themes that are both highly specific to Korea yet feel universal. As Bong would say, we all live in “the same country called capitalism.”
I mention this history only to emphasize how thrilling it’s been to see Bong’s work explode in both notice and appreciation in those intervening years, and with his Robert Pattinson starring “Mickey 17” hitting theaters this week, it’s the perfect time to dive into his idiosyncratic but towering career:
8. Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)
If this is your last Bong Joon Ho blindspot, don’t feel too guilty. Bong himself disparages his debut at almost every public opportunity, a movie he’s openly said he doesn’t think is “good.” During a Q&A for a double feature of “Memories of Murder” and “Barking Dogs Never Bite,” he even reportedly told the crowd he wouldn’t be offended if people left before the second film. But don’t let that fool you. “Barking Dogs” is pure Director Bong, an example of a first film that clearly captures the filmmaker’s voice, style, and identity. It’s more blackly comic than his later films, with a plot following an unemployed academic (Lee Sung-jae) who, while waiting for his life to progress, is slowly driven mad by the sound of the dogs barking in his apartment building. His solution is to hunt down and kill the yelping beasts, and, well, hijinks ensue. It’s a political allegory in line with his later features, depicting a dog-eat-dog world to absurdist extremes. An admittedly tough watch for animal lovers, most striking is Bong’s already assured visual style, with many of the hallmarks of his later films: those brilliant master shots that let the action unfold slowly in the frame, a striking use of light and movement, and an immersive, textured sense of place.
7. Mickey 17 (2025)
This is the kind of deliriously ambitious big-budget sci-fi blockbuster you hope a filmmaker makes after a global mega-success and unprecedented Oscar win. A proudly maximalist take on Ashton Edward’s novel, Director Bong’s “Parasite” follow-up features not one but two Robert Pattinsons (playing two “reprinted” clones of differing affect who do dangerous odd jobs for a Trumpish overlord), a planet of Verhoevenian critters, and nearly every actor, especially Toni Colette and Mark Ruffalo, is doing a voice. Bong takes everything he introduced in “Snowpiercer” and “Okja” and turns the dial way up. In two hours, Bong swerves from a Gilliamesque sci-fi class satire into a quadruple romcom with Naomi Ackie and Anamaria Vartolomei, then tackles death, mortality and our search for meaning, before pivoting into a surprising finale impossible to discuss without spoilers. “Mickey 17” can feel like it has too much on its mind, messily pulled in so many different directions it can’t do justice to any single idea, like two space clones chasing the same woman. It’s a lot, but it’s undeniably thrilling to see Bong cash a blank check to further explore his pet themes on an unprecedented scale.
6.Okja (2017)
Jake Gyllenhaal, go off. It is an unhinged performance, deranged even, welcoming superlatives that would seem like hyperbole if it wasn’t for how his line deliveries contort his body in odd shapes as his voice ricochets up and down. He’s a villain (along with Tilda Swinton’s corporate exec) who turns Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” into a horror movie as if Totoro was sent to a slaughterhouse for meat-packed distribution. As always with Bong, “Okja” isn’t quite one genre but, in fact, several: a bracing animal rights thriller, a gentle (and then horrifying) movie about a little girl’s bonded relationship with a big fantastical pig, and a quirky satire. The tonal balance doesn’t always work, sometimes approximating the Super Saiyan shifts in tone from joy to sorrow to excitement to despair we might expect in Japanese anime (Pattinson pointed to the flipped light-switch of changing emotions in anime as an inspiration for his performance in “Mickey 17“). The cast is well-acquainted with the challenge, from Paul Dano to Giancarlo Esposito and Steven Yeun. It’s an infectiously well-intentioned movie if a little didactic, shining a light on a subject movies that cost this much never do. There’s also something interesting about Bong’s English language movies where they are on a slightly different tonal register than his moodier, more cerebral South Korean work, whether that’s from a shift in language or budget. But “Okja’ is still a moving and powerful, if often disorienting, experience, held together by a series of committed performances as enjoyably unhinged as Bong’s filmmaking.
5. Snowpiercer (2014)
As lean, sleek, and fast-paced as the futuristic sci-fi train of the film’s title, this is Bong at his most easily entertaining –– and his first time upgrading to bigger budgets. It’s a more enjoyably bombastic iteration of the Marx-leaning ideas he would explore with more nuance in “Parasite,” following Chris Evans leading a troop of workers on a dystopian train in a post-apocalyptic tundra. They manage the steerage back half of the charging locomotive, keeping the train going with their grind and grit. Meanwhile, the “upper class” occupies the front, where each train car offers a different Epicurean indulgence. Inevitably, rebellion comes, giving way to a series of brilliantly staged action sequences that only Bong could deliver. But as we enter the engine room, we realize the film’s political focus is more complicated than the simple platitudes of class revolution, asking tricky questions about the complicity of capitalist systems and the exploitation of the worker. Plus, when Tilda Swinton and Ed Harris are having this much fun, it’s impossible not to go along with them.
4. The Host (2006)
If you can divide Bong Joon Ho’s career between bleak cerebral thrillers and his big sci-fi action movies (usually featuring more English and aimed at an international audience), “The Host” is the first and best. It’s a Kaiju actioner where, in a pointed satirical jab, it’s an American who orders a South Korean lab tech to pour a hundred bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River. Years later, those chemicals have given birth to an amphibious river beast that wreaks havoc around Seoul, and the government responds with totalitarian overtones. The best set piece features a long, brilliantly choreographed “oner” that follows the monster’s first attack, as the dim-witted father Park Gang-du (played by Song Kang-ho, a Bong regular who’s one of our great actors) runs to save his daughter (Park Hyun-seo) while helping innocent bystanders. He may be simple, but he’s got a good heart. Unlike “Snowpiercer” or even “Okja,” what anchors the CGI action in “The Host” is the central family in crisis trying to stay together, punctuated by moments of humanizing slapstick and actress Bae Doona’s arrow-firing badassery. As we see again and again in Bong’s films, the moral rot that starts at the top trickles down –– selfishness spreads like a pathogen, and the only antidote is love and community. “The Host” feels like a true blockbuster despite the impossibly small budget, and it remains as thrilling to me now as it did at its release.
3. Mother (2009)
One of Bong’s great genre plays, “Mother,” is a murder mystery that channels the noir trope of the obsessive detective with a twist: walking in the shoes of a PI is a mother living as a local herbalist in a rural village, whose unwavering love for her mentally disabled son is tested when he becomes the primary suspect in a girl’s shocking death. It’s a simple setup with complicated fallout, bolstered by a hypnotic performance by Kim Hye-ja as the mom, steadfast in her Chandleresque quest to prove her son’s innocence. She does what any detective would do: she finds clues (sometimes by breaking and entering), looks for witnesses, compiles evidence, strings together theories, and encircles the criminal element to find out what she needs to know. Even so, this description undersells the moody strangeness of how “Mother” actually unfolds, a feeling enhanced by the occasional intercutting of woozy flashbacks that reveal uneasy truths about this odd family. We can spot Bong’s recurring focus on class and disenfranchised people confronted by impotent authority figures. However, even more, he seems to ask what the limits of a mother’s love are, ending on a note of lasting emotional ambiguity that will fester.
2. Parasite (2019)
When Park So-dam sang “Jessica, Only Child, Illinois, Chicago” to my sold-out Friday night audience in downtown Chicago in the fall of 2019, the audience burst into cheers and laughter. It wasn’t the last time, especially when Song Kang-ho retrieved a hot sauce’d “bloody” napkin from the garbage, a ploy to further a family’s con job scheme to invite more and more of themselves to work in a well-to-do family’s mansion by kicking out the help. “Parasite” is Director Bong at the peak of his directorial and creative powers, a masterclass of pure cinematic craft so effervescent and controlled, it has the effect of watching 90s Michael Jordan sink a perfect basket (in keeping with our Chicago theme). There’s immense pleasure in watching Bong find each precisely right shot or brilliantly timed edit or how he effortlessly plants setups with catastrophic (but logical) payoffs. Once you think you know what “Parasite” is, it becomes something else, as though the act of thinking you pinned it down caused it to transform. Taken as a feat of style, “Parasite” is one of the directing performances of the decade, but Bong also introduces, then complicates, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic with cunning ingenuity. Far from simplistic messaging, Bong studies how we internalize class into our behavior, asking hard questions about where our allegiances, as well as our lines of empathy, truly lie. It will rightly go down as one of the best Best Picture wins of all time.
1. Memories Of Murder (2003)
Bong’s greatest remains his 2003 lyrical detective thriller masterwork, which exposes the lingering wounds of his home country’s difficult history through the lens of South Korea’s first major serial killer case. Following a corrupt, dunderheaded police detective at a rotten precinct (with Song Kang-ho again in the lead alongside Kim Sang-kyung as a hotshot cop from Seoul), “Memories Of Murder” unfolds less as a conventional murder mystery ––clue A leads to clue B –– than as a metaphorical gateway into the systemic failures of law and governance in 1980s South Korea as a whole. Vital pieces of evidence are mishandled or tossed aside, smart women are dismissed while foolish men stay in power, suspects are beaten and coerced into confession, and police bosses overlook details if it means a quick conviction. Outside the immediate scope of the case but nevertheless impacting it, we also witness strict curfews enforced, and protestors attacked by both military and police. In one of the film’s most powerful images, our detectives stand atop piles of burning detritus, the top-down wreckage of the era. Bong still finds a way to balance social critique while delivering both genre thrills and his love of slapstick, like rain-soaked stakeouts or the unexpected dropkick. But without revealing the ending, “Memories Of Murder” begins and ends with images of children gathering near murder sites, the next generation of South Korea, set to inherit the unforgivable sins of the past. It’s as though Bong’s film yearns for a catharsis that never comes, and we, like those sets of kids, have to sit with the consequences.
What do you think of our list? What’s your favorite film directed by Bong Joon Ho? Have you seen “Mickey 17” yet? If so, what did you think? Please let us know in the comments section below or on Next Best Picture’s X account.
