Before they became all-powerful media empires, film studios were young and inexperienced; unsure of themselves, they trusted these filmmakers and their trailblazing producers. The result was a cornucopia of wild and inventive cinema the likes of which we may never see again.

Here is the Post’s pick of 10 furiously original works that we consider to have been the best Korean films released in 2003.

10. The Uninvited

Two years after her iconic role in My Sassy Girl, Jun Ji-hyun showed us a completely different side of herself in the brooding psychological horror The Uninvited.

One of the earliest Korean genre films directed by a woman (Lee Soo-yeon), this film follows a soon-to-be-married interior decorator who begins having visions of a pair of young girls in his dark, ruby red flat. He seeks counselling and comes into contact with a curious fellow patient, played by Jun.

What follows is a probing and chilling descent into the recesses of the mind, where memory and trauma coalesce into vivid waking nightmares.

9. The Classic

Son Ye-jin of Crash Landing on You got her starmaking turn in redolent romance The Classic, director Kwak Jae-yong’s follow-up to My Sassy Girl.

Son plays mother and daughter in two sweeping love stories, one set in the past and the other in the present when the daughter discovers her mother’s old love letters and deals with her own flirtations at school.

Filled with pure, youthful love and cuddling under umbrellas during sudden summer showers, the film lives up to its name – it is a classic melodrama.

8. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring

Late director Kim Ki-duk’s legacy was destroyed when multiple allegations of his abuse surfaced. Korean film fans were left with the thorny question of what to do with his body of work.

Regardless of who he was, his acclaimed drama Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring is not a film that can be swept under the rug and forgotten about. It even held the title of most successful Korean film at the US box office for a decade.

7. Repatriation

Kim Dong-won is generally considered Korea’s foremost documentary filmmaker, and his most important work was the heart-wrenching Repatriation.

Kim’s film focuses on the many North Korean political prisoners jailed in South Korea on trumped-up spying charges under the latter’s military dictatorships.

Hundreds of hours of frank personal interviews were edited down to produce a searing account of lives and minds lost to the internecine conflicts of a broken peninsula.

6. Untold Scandal

Dangerous Liaisons got a thrilling and exquisite twist in director E J-yong’s bold, erotic period drama Untold Scandal.

This Korean version of French author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century tale of two lascivious cousins who engage in a bet to seduce a virtuous young woman, features Bae Yong-joon, the biggest K-drama star of his day (Winter Sonata), and a mesmerising turn by Jeon Do-yeon, currently on screens in Crash Course in Romance and Kill Boksoon.

5. A Tale of Two Sisters

A serious contender for best K-horror of all time, Kim Jee-woon’s sumptuous and hair-raising adaptation of a folk tale pushed the limits of what Korean film could achieve.

Benefiting from ravishing sets and costumes, layered and dynamic camerawork and expert sound design, the film draws us into its macabre tale of two sisters going to live with their father and new mother-in-law in a house in the countryside.

Vivid and deeply unsettling, A Tale of Two Sisters raised the bar for Korean horror to a level few have managed to match, let alone surpass.

4. A Good Lawyer’s Wife

Moon So-ri plays the wife in a family full of cheaters who contemplates embarking on her own affair in Im Sang-soo’s provocative and engrossing drama.

The modern Korean family unit is smashed to pieces in a story that explores the explosively opposing forces of emasculation and female empowerment in a society undergoing swift and uncomfortable change.

Funny, sexy and terrifically acted, A Good Lawyer’s Wife is a singularly rich and surprising affair drama.

3. Oldboy

By 2003, Korean cinema was already becoming a globally recognised force, but Park Chan-wook’s explosive Oldboy, the second feature in his celebrated “Vengeance Trilogy” (between 2002’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and 2005’s Lady Vengeance), is the film that really got people in the West to take notice.It earned the Grand Prix (the second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival and rumour has it jury president Quentin Tarantino wanted to award it the Palme d’Or (which eventually went to the political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11).In this iconic masterclass in style, Choi Min-sik plays an ordinary salaryman imprisoned in a mystery room for 15 years before being released and trying to figure out who put him there.

2. Save the Green Planet!

A lot of audacious Korean films emerged in 2003, none more so than Jang Joon-hwan’s bewildering debut Save the Green Planet, a box office bomb that would go on to become one of the country’s most cherished cult classics.

Beyond Evil star Shin Ha-kyun takes on the role of a lifetime as a deranged young man who kidnaps a corporate CEO he believes to be an alien prince from Andromeda.

What follows is a giddy and unforgettable mix of sci-fi, comedy, romance, horror, procedural thriller, torture porn and social commentary, festooned with punk covers of Over the Rainbow and cocktail umbrellas.

1. Memories of Murder

There can only be one at the top and when it comes to Korean film in 2003, there can be no other: Bong Joon-ho’s sensational Memories of Murder is the serial killer thriller par excellence.Loosely based on a notorious unsolved case of serial murders in Korea in the 1980s (the killer was finally revealed in 2019), Bong’s film follows Kim Sang-kyung’s city slicker detective and Song Kang-ho’s country bumpkin investigator, who team up and try to catch a killer in the countryside.

Released four years before Zodiac, Memories of Murder turned the serial killer genre on its head. Filled with dark humour, a prevailing sense of dread and overflowing with the anxieties of a pre-democratic Korea, the film is routinely cited as the greatest Korean film of all time.

Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FMqWWcp51kuaqyxKyrsqSVZLhuvM6pZqRlnaTDqrHSaJirrJmYuaZ7kmtobG1mZ3xyfIybnKysXaC8s7HAp2Smp6aesrR5kWlnbGWpmq6zec6lm5unqWK6prnOq6Ceq12iwrOwxKtkmqaUYsGiuMRmq7CnXai2tMDEq6pmmZ6Zeq6t2JucZpqVqMFuxcSaqWadppq%2F