There’s no question that Sergeant Oh is the leader of the gang. He’s the only one who’s traveled the world, training soldiers in Africa and the Middle East, and he’s thought deepest about the likely future scenarios for the divided Koreas. When the others fret about having to shoot each other should war break out, Song’s character gives a sobering answer: “Three minutes into the war, both countries would be destroyed. A total wasteland. Don’t you get it?” He’s tired when he says it. He’s tired of thinking it, and it weighs on him all the time. 

Many South Korean audience members must have been stunned to hear such an antiwar sentiment from a North Korean soldier. In the present day, when global smash-hit rom-com series Crash Landing on You can contemplate a cross-Korean-border relationship, it’s hard to appreciate how daring JSA was at the time for a mainstream South Korean film.

Only a few years earlier, in October 1996, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled that government film censorship was unconstitutional. Yet Amnesty International noted that censorship continued, and struggles of filmmakers and even film exhibitors against gatekeepers were far from over.

In November 1997, human-rights activist Suh Joon-sik was arrested for violating South Korea’s National Security Law by screening the South Korean film Red Hunt. The authorities determined that showing the documentary, about the South Korean government crushing an uprising on Jeju Island in 1948, benefitted North Korea.

At the time of Suh’s arrest, South Korea was only on its fifth president since the Republic of Korea, the country’s official name, was established in 1948. The first four presidents were strongmen whose terms were marked with brutal suppressions, curtailing of personal freedoms, assassinations, coups, and unrest. Kim Young-sam, a former activist elected president in 1992, established reforms, but his term is probably most remembered for struggling to right the economy during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. The economic hardships and lost jobs were also a psychological blow to a country that had prided itself on its rapid industrialization and established middle class after a devastating civil war. Its growing gross domestic product had also symbolized an emergence from centuries of cultural domination and outright colonization by its larger neighbors, China and Japan. 

Perhaps the soul-searching that ensued was one factor that prompted Kim Young-sam’s successor, Kim Dae-jung—another former activist—to institute a “Sunshine Policy” of positive engagement with North Korea. JSA came out in the third year of the policy’s glow, and in 2007, Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, presented North Korea’s Kim Jong-il with a DVD of the film at an inter-Korean summit. It has been rumored that Dear Leader, a noted cinephile, became a fan of the film. He wasn’t alone. 

JSA wasn’t the first South Korean film to show sympathetic North Koreans, but it certainly was the first blockbuster to do so. It became South Korea’s top-grossing film (a honor held until Kwak Kyung-taek’s Friend seized it the next year). JSA also accelerated the careers of its stars. Lee Byung-hun landed roles in Hollywood action movies in both the G.I. Joe and Terminator franchises. Lee Young-ae, who played the lead investigator in the inquiry, was cast as the lead of Dae Jang Geum, a period soap opera that found an international audience and made her one of East Asia’s biggest celebrities. Song Kang-ho continued to star in a string of Korean box-office hits.

Song’s Sergeant Oh gives his friends some combat advice in JSA, noting that “carrying yourself with composure and strength—that’s everything.” Song could have been talking about his own acting career, in which he continues to morph into convincing but unrelated characters. For someone who was never formally trained as an actor, his work brims with self-confidence.

His big film break was landing a featured role in Kim Jee-woon’s debut, The Quiet Family (1998). In this grim comedy, Song plays a son in an extended family trying to make a go at running a ramshackle mountain lodge. They might be starting over after being wiped out by the Asian financial crisis. Their new business goes horribly wrong, however, when guests at the lodge start dying, either by their own hands or by those of others. Reporting the crimes would be the death of their business, as well, so they logically bury the bodies in the woods. Song’s character grins with pride as his father praises him at the dinner table for his improving grave-digging skills. The Quiet Family cheerily bounces along like a gory Addams Family episode, helped by a desperately eclectic soundtrack that includes the Stray Cats, Love and Rockets, the Box Tops, and the Partridge Family. The film was a hit with critics, and while it wasn’t a box-office sensation, Song impressed Kim enough to land the lead of the director’s second film, The Foul King. That film, which opened in February 2000, was a smash that was eclipsed when JSA opened that September.

JSA’s success provided Park Chan-wook with the artistic freedom to delve into his next feature, the bruising and bloody Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), reuniting Song Kang-ho with Shin Ha-kyun, who had brought a puppy level of excitement and earnestness to his role as his partner in JSA. Mr. Vengeance is a much tighter film than JSA and establishes a certain threshold of gore and violence for New Korean Cinema. Song provides some comedic touches, but Shin’s performance as deaf-mute kidnapper Ryu anchors the film. Shin channels a blend of Buster Keaton’s stoicism and Harold Lloyd’s doggedness, but there’s nothing funny about the deadly intent in his eyes. He’s out to kill Song’s Dong-jin for murdering his anarchist partner (Bae Doona), while Dong-jin is pursuing him for the accidental drowning of his child. Dong-jin, a corporate executive, does research and learns that Ryu had lost his job, and the kidnapping was meant to pay for a kidney transplant for his sister. When the two are finally face to face, Dong-jin is anguished, crying out, “I know you’re a good guy, but you know why I have to kill you!”

The struggle between the two men raises the question of who exactly is the mister referenced in the title. Perhaps our sympathies must lie with a God forced to unleash vengeance upon a society that is rigged for the rich and allows its most vulnerable to suffer and fall prey to organ traffickers, in which case Mr. Vengeance wears its bloody heart on its sleeve. In addition to launching Park’s trilogy, the film’s ferocious portrayal of class warfare was echoed in many Korean films of the aughts and beyond.

It may be best to see Barking Dogs Never Bite, Bong Joon Ho’s 2000 directorial debut, before Mr. Vengeance, and perhaps before any other film in the Criterion Channel’s New Korean Cinema series. Bong, who grew up secretly watching films on the American Forces Korea Network, a channel for U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea, is probably the most consistent writer-director of the Korean New Wave. And Barking Dogs is the visual equivalent of a filmmaker finding his generation’s voice, and articulating what he sees in a country in transition.

The crumbling apartment block where the film takes place includes denizens struggling to keep up with a society in which upward mobility is for the corrupted and corruptible. A graduate student grovels at the feet of his pregnant wife, the family breadwinner, begging her to use some of her corporate salary to pay for a bribe to land him a faculty position. A homeless man wanders the basement area, eating food left out by the maintenance staff. A woman operating a nearby convenience store sees little business and snacks on her own inventory. The stairwells are choked with the excess belongings of downsized families, and the basement may be haunted by a would-be whistleblower cemented into a wall.

Mr. Vengeance is the first of Park Chan-wook’s so-called Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik, who with his bare hands turned off an entire generation of viewers to eating octopus in the second installment, Oldboy (2003), returns to play a child murderer in the final installment, Lady Vengeance (2005). The lady of the title is none other than Lee Young-ae, who played the investigator in JSA. On being released from prison after more than thirteen years for a young boy’s murder, a crime she didn’t commit, Lee’s character, Geum-ja, pauses when presented with a tofu cake. Eating the bland fare is an action that Korean ex-cons typically undertake to demonstrate they plan to “live white and never sin again,” as the local minister says, encouraging Geum-ja. She sends the cake crashing to the ground. 

How can she eat it when she plans to kill Choi’s Mr. Baek, the real culprit? In flashbacks, we see her bond with people she encountered in jail, and these relationships yield bloody fruit when she’s released. One former inmate helps her piece together a gun. Another connection gives her a job in a bakery. Her most vulnerable ally submits herself to Mr. Baek in order to keep him put until Lady Vengeance herself is ready. Vivaldi strings leaven Geum-ja’s steps as she fulfills her grim task.

Before Geum-ja confronts Mr. Baek, she is accosted by two assassins, played by Song and Shin, another matchup after JSA and the first installment of the Vengeance Trilogy. There’s nothing amusing about the paces the two put Geum-ja through, but the casting for the nonspeaking cameos is slyly comical. 

When Geum-ja snares Mr. Baek, she considers how to dispose of him until she discovers that he killed several more children while she was in prison. With the help of the police, she gathers the families of the murdered children. What follows are the most difficult scenes of the Korean Wave to sit through: the group watches the killer’s videos of their bound children, including toddlers, begging to be let go in the last moments of their lives. After that, the families decide to murder a bound and gagged Mr. Baek in vignettes of hesitation, resolve, and the brandishing of impressive array of weaponry. 

There are elements of horror in Lady Vengeance, but it isn’t truly a horror film when the audience is aware right off the bat that the protagonist is the scariest thing around. But there are a number of true horror films in the Criterion series.