Best Korean Movies to Watch on Netflix with your partner

Based on the short story ‘Barn Burning’ by internationally-acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami, this film is a psychological drama that was nominated for an Academy Award. Despite featuring in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of ‘best films of the decade,’ this tense thriller deserved wider recognition. It tells the tale of a deliveryman, Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), who bumps into a friend from childhood, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo). They meet Ben (Steven Yeun, familiar from The Walking Dead TV series), an enigmatic young man who confesses an unusual ‘hobby’ – setting fire to abandoned greenhouses. Jong-su believes Ben to be dangerous, and the unfolding drama is enthralling viewing for your date night.

Fans of the classic Korean zombie feature ‘Train to Busan’ will love this. The central protagonist is a loner video gamer who needs to fight for his survival as the world in lapses into a scene from one of the games he is used to playing. Now surrounded by actual entities he must vanquish to survive, he can put the skills he has picked up as an expert gamer to good use.

Time to Hunt invites you to fast-forward to a dystopian South Korean future. A gang of young friends are busy planning a large robbery in the waker of the financial collapse. But this movie is so much more than just a high-octane thriller, it is also a coming of age tale that will captivate you emotionally. These are surely the perfect ingredients for the perfect watch for your romantic evening.

Featuring Bong Joon-ho, one of the actors from the award-winning feature ‘Parasite,’ as well as Hollywood heavy-hitters Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, this Korean feature is a marvelous genre-defying movie that will capture your hearts. The star of the show is child actress Ahn Seo-hyun, who is in charge of a pig, genetically-modified to have grown into a massive creature. But ‘Okja’ is so much more than just a movie about a girl and her oversized porcine pet. It is a powerful allegory about the plight of individuals when faced with all-consuming corporate greed. If you are looking for a film that will enthrall you but also make you think about serious issues in equal measures, this is it.

If you’re searching for a less cerebral feature where you can switch off your brain and submit to high-octane action, Pandora focuses on an earthquake that has caused a nuclear power plant to ignite. Surely a worst-case scenario lurking at the back of any nuclear engineer’s mind, this is an effective disaster movie that presents the consequences of government and corporate malpractice, on an epic scale.

After all that frenetic nuclear hokum, ‘Seoul Searching’ is the perfect antidote. It is a raunchy comedy about a group of Korean-American teenagers who attend a summer camp in Korea in 1986, intending to find out a bit more about their Asian heritage. Instead, they get caught up in parties, drinking games, and romance. This coming of age story is heavily-indebted to 80s nostalgia and would make the perfect conclusion to your movie night.