Barking Dogs Never Bite

Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개, 2000) is Bong Joon-ho's feature debut — a dark South Korean comedy you can watch online on iFILM. It arrived three years before Memories of Murder and a full decade before the director became a household name worldwide.

Yun-ju is a broke graduate student scraping by as a part-time lecturer, stuck in a crowded Seoul apartment block with a pregnant girlfriend and a career going nowhere. Then a dog somewhere in the building starts barking. And keeps barking. Yun-ju snaps and takes drastic action — setting off a chain of events that drags in a relentlessly curious building-management clerk and a cast of neighbours who are each, in their own way, right at the edge. Lee Sung-jae and Bae Doona play their roles with deadpan precision, ridiculous and oddly sympathetic at the same time.

Bong built the film around the gap between what people expect their lives to be and what those lives actually look like from the outside. It is compact and quietly bitter, with the same class-conscious undertow that runs through everything he made after. Stream Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) online on iFILM.