20 Underrated Movies From 2000 You've Probably Never Seen
8. Joint Security Area
Released: 9th September 2000 (South Korea)
Twenty years before Parasite became the first foreign language Best Picture winner, modern cinema in South Korea was just beginning to flourish. This 2000 mystery thriller was the breakthrough movie for one of the New Korean Cinema movement's most distinctive voices: Vengeance trilogy helmer Park Chan-wook.
A whodunnit set in one of the most politically volatile spots on Earth, Joint Security Area sees Lee Young-ae (Park's Lady Vengeance) as the neutral Swiss investigator having to make sense of the divergent stories on different sides when a North Korean border guard is shot within the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
Compared to the wild genre bending of the director's later work, Joint Security Area is a fairly conventional mystery-solving exercise, but one that is expertly directed with real suspense and the feeling that the slightest mis-step doesn't just mean failing to solve the puzzle but also causing a major international incident.
Joint Security Area was the biggest film ever at the Korean box office at the time. It deserves to be seen just as much by audiences in the rest of the world as well.