Murakami is notoriously difficult to adapt and South Korean director Lee Chang Dong (Poetry) wisely takes just the bare bones of the writer’s short story Barn Burning to deliver a brilliantly executed, abstract but intellectually stimulating portrait of working class frustrations and contemporary alienation. A psychological thriller that lingers on expressionistic moments, it also finds time to incorporate Miles Davis’s Générique from Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold.
Listen to our review of Burning in the February Film Podcast. It starts at the 0.38 mark: