BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE (2000)
Directed by: Bong Jun-Ho
Starring: Lee Sung-Jae, Bae Doo-Na

• Winner, Best Editing, Slamdance Film Festival 2000

• Winner, Best New Actress, Bae Doo-Na, 21st Chongryong Awards, Korea

• Co-Winner, International Film Critics Federation Award for Young Asian Cinema, 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival

When we at Subway Cinema write these blurbs and reviews we try to figure out an angle that we'll use to market the movie and attract the widest possible audience. We try to choose words that appeal to any number of people, and we eliminate opinions that will alienate potential viewers. I can't do that for this movie. 

This is my favorite movie in this festival, and I don't know how to market it, and I suppose that makes me a bad person, but sometimes if a movie's good enough do you have to market it? Does it all have to be boiled down to a sound bite?


Because Barking Dogs Never Bite can't be boiled down and that's what makes it great. Set in a sterile apartment complex stuck out in the suburban boonies this movie is a rallying cry for all of us humanoids. Humanoids — human beings beat down by dead end jobs, living in maximum security apartment blocks, isolated from everything good, exposed to everything bad, paid just enough to put food in our mouths so we can show up for work the next day, but never enough to actually get anywhere, we're complacent, placid, easily manipulated and, as long as we punch the clock, we're nothing to be afraid of.

But sometimes a humanoid will go off the rails and that's when everyone needs to find some cover.

Marketing robots can't figure out what to do with a movie this contradictory: a repulsively funny, horribly beautiful, hilariously human, nastily sweet, thrillingly pathetic implosion of all the worst and best things you've ever done. It's a comedy, but when you laugh you're laughing at something real, not an empty pratfall. You're watching other humanoids scamper about onscreen, trying to sort out their messy, mixed-up humanoid lives and failing, just like humanoids everywhere.

There's Bae Doo-Na, a female member of an apartment building’s custodial staff who yearns to do something brave, but is terminally lazy. Crowned with a bad haircut, she lounges around her friend’s convenience store, avoiding work and dreaming of fighting robbers. Stuck in suburban hell, the airless days pass and she’s caught trying to expend the minimum amount of energy to keep her boss off her back while trying to stay entertained. Drinking, goofing off, taking naps, it all blurs into one, long, stifling afternoon. The other side of the apartment complex is dominated by Lee Sung-Jae, a part-time lecturer whose pregnant wife brings home the paycheck while he struggles to find some kind of employment that’ll use the big old brain he just spent thousands of dollars getting a degree for. Trapped in his apartment, he’s slowly driven berserk by the incessant barking of a tiny yip dog that someone has stashed in their apartment in direct violation of the building’s “No Dogs” policy.

By the end of the movie one of these characters has lost their job and one of them has lost their soul, but before they get to that point they must confront the ghostly tale of Boiler Kim, the mysteries of the length of a roll of toilet paper, the number of cracked walnuts that can fit in a glass, lost dogs, good stew, the price of binoculars, and dog-napping of the highest order.

I don’t have words to do justice to this movie. Watching it with an audience and hearing genuine laughter break out after seeing so many movies where the audience is programmed to be a laugh track, demurely guffawing at lame onscreen antics, is like a restorative for your soul. Barking Dogs is a tonic, a hair ointment, a moisturizer, a can opener, a comedy, a tragedy, it’s American Beauty on laughing gas, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted from a movie but were afraid to ask. One of the few independent movies from Korea, and the director’s first film, this is a movie that would more than live up to its hype, if anyone who watched it knew how to hype it. But I’m disarmed when faced with a movie this good. I don’t know what more to say than this: in every sense of the word, this is one of the best movies you’ll ever see.