20 Amazing South Korean Movies You Must See Before You Die

Before Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong first established his reputation with his sophomore effort Peppermint Candy, a movie which begins with a suicide and then cycles back through a reverse chronology of the past two decades to show how we reached this point.

The backwards structure allows for a descent into protagonist Kim Yong-ho's psychological makeup and an exploration of Lee's favourite themes of lost innocence and violent trauma, here used as a symbol for the history of modern Korea and Korean masculinity as a whole.

The inciting incident, which (in the style of Memento, which came out at the same time) is therefore the climax of the film, is the Gwangju Massacre where the army fired on and killed student demonstrators against martial law. The event serves as a loss of innocence for both Kim, beginning the character's cycle of violence and self-destruction, and South Korea itself.

Even away from the commentary on the state of the nation, Peppermint Candy represents a compelling character study, its novel structure introducing us to a largely unpleasant person and then peeling back the layers to allow us to see the man he could have become had the world around him not moulded him into something else.