Director – Bong Joon Ho – 2000 – South Korea – 110m
****1/2
Available exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, September 18th.
Lecturer Yun-ju (Lee Sun-jae) is looking out the window of his apartment in a block of flats and having been recently passed over for a professorship is on the phone to a colleague, but can’t concentrate because of a persistent dog barking. He resolves to do something about it. Chancing later upon a dog without an owner near his front door, he takes it up to the roof but then, unable to drop it off the balcony, takes it down to a basement corridor and traps it in an old wardrobe.
Maintenance office worker Park Hyun-nam (Doona Bae) is visited by a little girl in a yellow waterproof to get her missing dog posters officially stamped so that they won’t get taken down.
Hen-pecked by his working, pregnant wife Eun-sil (Kim Ho-jung), Yun-ju learns from a colleague that the person who got the professorship has died so the position should now be his – for a $10 000 bribe. And the barking hasn’t stopped – he got the wrong dog because the little girl’s posters mention that the missing dog can’t bark following a throat op. In the basement, he discovers a janitor using the first dog’s corpse to make a tasty meal. Hiding he hears the janitor tell the grisly ghost story of legendary repair man Boiler Kim.
Later, he manages to steal the barking dog from its old lady owner (Kim Gin-goo). Hyun-nam and her friend Jang-mi (Go Su-hee) have just watched a TV report on a cashier who disarmed a knife man in her bank when they see him throw the live dog off the roof. Dropping Jang-mi’s binoculars, Hyun-nam gives chase, failing not only to catch him when she collides with someone’s door suddenly opening onto the walkway but also to see his face. She is later able to show the old lady the dog’s corpse and have the janitor bury it. Once she’s left, he digs the corpse back up. His attempts to cook the dog are thwarted when a homeless man sleeping in the basement eats it when he leaves the pot to fetch some spices.
Horrified to learn his wife has now bought a dog and expected him to feed and walk it, Yun-ju unfortunately loses their new pet in the smoke produced by a worker fumigating the sidewalk and finds himself taking missing dog posters to Hyan-nam, who doesn’t recognise him even when they chat about the dog killings. Later, she runs across the janitor on the rooftop preparing to roast the dog on a spit and rescues it, fleeing down stairwells and along walkways in a reversal of her earlier pursuit. However, she fails to make the cut in a report about the arrested janitor on the TV news.
Yun-ju and his wife seem to live in a world of resentment – she resents him for not making much money and loads tasks onto him – crack this bag of walnuts, go to the shops, look after the dog – which he in turn resents. At a works do at a restaurant he has to fork out for a shirt which includes drinks and he thinks the required bribe to secure his professorship is simply too high. In an argument in their flat, Eun-sil throws a knife at him and Yun-ju hurls a hammer in her direction which goes straight through a window pane.
The yellow-coated little girl is more concerned about finding her missing dog than fulfilling social obligations by going to school. The old lady, when not out walking her dog, is drying out radishes on the building roof which she later, knowing she is dying, bequeaths to Hyan-nam. And the two workers at the bottom of the pile Hyan-nam and Jang-mi seem content with their lot, going out and getting drunk or hanging out on the rooftop so Jang-mi can have a smoke.
The fact that Hyun-nam is out of the office a lot helping residents put up posters eventually gets her fired. Like its rejection of heroine of Microhabitat (Jeon Go-woon, 2017), conformist Korean society doesn’t quite see it that way. A heroic cashier caught on camera in a bank is feted as a hero, a housing worker on an apartment block not so much. Korean society is about haves and have-nots: here as elsewhere in his films such as Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite (2019), director Bong sides with the have-nots while seeking to understand the haves.
The film is awash with compelling, incidental detail. Yun-ju tries to justify to himself the bribe to get his job by discussing it with his unborn child in his partner’s swollen belly while she sleeps. Hyun-nam gets a late night prank call telling her she’s a guest on her first love’s This Is Your Life TV show appearance. And, best of the lot, the janitor relates his tale of Boiler Kim, after whose murder the boilers in the building make a noise resembling the repair’s trademark line describing appliances he’s fixed as “spin… spin… spinning”.
Director Bong’s later films may be bigger and more ambitious, but this feature debut has elements which already mark him out as a very special talent.
Barking Dogs Never Bite is out exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema in the UK on Friday, September 18th.
Trailer (unsubtitled):