Burning ends with Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) finally doing the one thing the film has spent nearly two and a half hours suggesting he never will: he acts. After Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) vanishes, leaving behind an unnaturally clean apartment, a suitcase she never took and no sign of her cat, Jong-su becomes convinced that Ben (Steven Yeun), the rich, unreadable man she came home from Nairobi with, is responsible. His suspicion hardens when Ben invites him up to his Gangnam apartment. Ben has a new cat he says is a rescued stray, and in a bathroom drawer full of women’s jewelry, Jong-su finds a pink watch just like the one he once gave Hae-mi. When the cat slips out, it comes to the name “Boil,” which was the name of Hae-mi’s cat. Jong-su walks out of Ben’s dinner party without a word. Later, he lures Ben to the countryside by claiming he’s with Hae-mi, and when Ben arrives and asks where she is, Jong-su stabs him to death. He soaks Ben’s body and Porsche in gasoline, sets them on fire, throws his own bloodied clothes into the flames, and drives off naked in his truck.
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Did Ben Kill Hae-mi in Burning?
The film never says. Everything pointing to Ben is circumstantial: the watch, the cat, and his confession that he burns an abandoned greenhouse every two months as a hobby, which Jong-su comes to read as a confession about women rather than greenhouses. Every one of those clues has a second reading. The pink watch was a cheap promotional prize. Jong-su fed Hae-mi’s cat for weeks without ever actually seeing it, so even its existence was uncertain from the start. Hae-mi herself said, through tears, that she wanted to disappear. And Jong-su checks the greenhouses near his farm again and again without finding a single one burned, even though Ben insists he burned one close by. Lee Chang-dong keeps the question open on purpose. What makes Ben frightening isn’t proof but his ease. He’s bored, wealthy and always smiling, and he lives in a world where a young woman with no money can drop out of sight without anyone being made to answer for it.
What Does the Ending of Burning Mean?
Just before the finale, Lee shows Jong-su sitting in Hae-mi’s empty apartment, typing. It’s the first time we see the aspiring novelist actually writing, and its placement invites the question of whether what follows really happens or is the story he’s finally found. Lee has said the killing “could have also been a part of this novel that Jong-su is newly writing,” while also calling the final scene a warning about how rage can explode. That rage is the real subject of this loose adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s “Barn Burning.” Jong-su does odd jobs, has a father tangled up in legal trouble, and drives a battered truck. Ben has a Porsche, a Gangnam apartment and a job nobody can name. Lee has described young people who sense “there’s something wrong in this world” without being able to pin down the cause, and the stabbing is Jong-su pinning it, at last, to one person. In doing so, he becomes the very thing he suspected Ben of being, the man who sets fires and leaves nothing behind. Whether the ending is justice, delusion or fiction, the film refuses to settle, and that’s what makes it so unsettling: Jong-su’s anger is real, even if he can never be sure he aimed it at the right target.
