South Korean media is finally having a well-deserved moment in the global pop culture landscape. Largely spurred by Parasite‘s Oscar win in 2020 and Squid Game‘s virality in 2021, American audiences have finally realized there’s a huge amount of incredible TV and film coming out of South Korea.
But where to start? One way to sort through the abundance is to just narrow your search down to the streaming services you’re already paying for and see what they offer. Unfortunately, if you have Hulu, there isn’t much.
The good news is that Hulu has significantly more Korean TV series. The bad news is that there’s only a small handful of films. As of August 2024, there are exactly six Korean films on Hulu. Two of them are concert films. Luckily, at least two of them are top-tier watches.
Let’s dive in.
6. PSY Summer Swag 2022
As the title might suggest, Psy Summer Swag 2022 is a concert and documentary film about South Korean rapper/singer-songwriter Psy’s first concerts after the worst of the pandemic. If this seems like a random pick for Hulu to feature, it’s probably because the media cycles of the last decade have completely rotted our brains. If you can think back to 2012, you’ll realize that you know Psy, because he’s the “Gangam Style” guy.
5. Hunt
In the unforgiving words of Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ consensus, “Hunt has enough thrills to satisfy more forgiving espionage fans.” In other words, Lee Jung-jae’s 2022 spy thriller Hunt is fine. It’s about two intelligence agents trying to sniff out the North Korean mole in their agency. Somewhere along the line, the drive to stop a plot to assassinate the South Korean president’s thrown in there, too. Perhaps most interesting to the average viewer, one of those agents is played by Squid Game‘s Lee Jung-jae. And we all love him.
4. BLACKPINK: The Movie
Of course, incredible TV and film aren’t the only exceptional media coming out of South Korea. K-Pop is a force of its own. And of all the K-Pop groups, indisputably one of the top ones is BLACKPINK. 2021’s BLACKPINK: The Movie celebrates the fifth anniversary of the group’s 2016 debut album. Concert footage is mixed with interviews which each of the five members and reminiscences with the full group. It’s more tailored to pre-existing fans than for ushering in new ones, but if you’re curious about K-Pop, why not start here?
3. Broker
There are several kinds of brokers in the world, Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2022 film Brokers follow a particularly unusual (and legally iffy, at best) kind. These brokers run around the adoption system to sell babies to rich couples who aren’t able to have their own. Eventually, one of the mothers (and the toddler) comes back to the duo, and the three of them try to find the child a good home. Brokers is both funny and sentimental. The words “beautiful” and “strange” pop up a lot in its reviews.
2. I Saw The Devil
Directed by Kim Jee-won in 2010, I Saw The Devil is regularly cited as one of the best Korean revenge-thrillers out there. It’s a little bit Seven, a little bit John Wick. I Saw The Devil follows an intelligence agent tracking down the taxi-driving serial killer who murdered his wife. But the film undergoes a slow, dark spiral whthatich pushes against the romanticized idea that revenge is noble. Revenge, it turns out, can also be destructive.
1. Parasite
The consensus is correct: Parasite is a masterpiece. Bong Joon-ho’s seminal 2019 film won an Oscar for a reason. A member of the low-income Kim family is hired to housesit for the fabulously wealthy Park family. And things unravel from there.
Like the U.S., there’s a huge gap between the wealthy and everyone else in South Korea. And for that “everyone else,” it’s getting harder and harder to live. Parasite looks straight at those socio-economic themes, and much, much more.
Published: Aug 25, 2024 02:25 pm