Park Chan-wook directed two movies before 2000’s Joint Security Area, but he’s long preferred that people see the film — his first made with a satisfying amount of artistic control — as his proper debut. Co-written with Kim Hyun-seok, Jeong Seong-san, and Lee Moo-yeong, Park gives the movie a set-up foreshadowing a potentially twisty, political intrigue-thick whodunit: the killing of a duo of North Korean officers stationed at the Korean Demilitarized Zone ostensibly by a South Korean counterpart. The latter’s confession (he was kidnapped) doesn’t line up with what survivors of the incident on the other side are telling (that they were victims of some sort of unclear-to-them revenge). 

Working for the Neutral Nations Supervisory Committee, a young, no-nonsense Swiss Army major, Sophie (Lee Young-ae), is brought in to investigate, her task naturally pressurized by the unabating tensions between the sparring nations being represented. Her mature-beyond-her-years cool-headedness initially portends a sleuth-first mystery film — the sort that’s about as transfixed with the central case as it is the Poirot- or Columbo-style prodigy coming in to disentangle it. (Her outsiderdom is doubly reinforced by her being Korean but Geneva-raised, and her being the first woman to have set foot on the Swiss Army’s Korean base since 1953.) 

Joint Security Area’s first major upending of expectations comes from its not quite being sleuth-first after all. Most of the movie, which has frequently (and ultimately not very accurately) been compared to Akira Kurosawa’s iconically perspective-shifting Rashomon (1950), ends up taking place in an extended flashback. It puts us in the immediate lead-up to its inciting incident and is almost entirely uninterrupted by the assigned-to-be-neutral Sophie’s first-act interrogations and following of leads. The second upending is that the reason for the plot-motivating shootout isn’t so steeped in suspenseful intrigue but, more heartrendingly, the consequence of an inherently risky, nation-betraying attempt at long-term friendship, the detonation of violence “an act of rage at a system turned inward by the system itself,” as Chuck Bowen has written. 

There isn’t, as might be expected, a syrupy, why-can’t-we-be-friends quality to Joint Security Area that might make its belief that war corrodes humanity in more ways than one seem naïve. The film skirts it because of the chemistry of its four unlikely-friend leads, played by Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, Kim Tae-woo, and Shin Ha-kyun with a pronounced, poignant sense that this is probably the first time in adulthood where they’ve experienced true friendship. Their careers have given them little opportunity not to practice defensive, militaristically motivated stoicism. It’s a relief for them to talk about something other than political fealty while, say, snacking on banned-up-North moon pies or goofing off during border-security shifts with across-the-way spits-off they hope their superiors don’t notice. “It’s nice to be called ‘brother,’” one of the men confesses. 

Park and his collaborators also wisely avoid any sort of clunky emotional (or meant-to-be edifying) didacticism around the conflict that makes the men’s friendship unsustainable. Emphasizing their humanity is a plenty effective tool for the film’s ideas to be made clear. (I can’t think of another film where the letting out of a fart, even if it is supposed to be funny, feels as meaningful — as indicative of how much the four have been needing people around whom they feel comfortable letting it all out.) One almost forgets Joint Security Area starts off as a whodunit.