Barking Dogs Never Bite

Who among us has not considered putting a neighbour’s persistently barking dog out of its misery? At any rate this is the drastic course of action favoured by the anti-hero of Bong Joon-ho’s first feature, a black comedy set in and around an apartment block, where dissolute grad student GoYoon-joo (Lee Sung-ga fresh off his breakthrough in Attack the Gas Station) repeatedly engages in dog-napping, the building’s janitor cooks up the bodies, and bookkeeper Hyun-nam (former model Bae Doona in one of her earliest acting roles) tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Bong had made a couple of acclaimed short films by this point but this is still very much an apprentice work with a low budget indie vibe, albeit with considerable visual sophistication and a lounge jazz score. Think early de Palma, but with a distinctly Korean spice.

Rest assured, no animals were injured in the making of the film (which Bong wanted to call “A Higher Animal”, and he didn’t mean Man).

After Saturday’s screening, Dal Yon Jin, Distinguished Professor in the School of Communication at SFU, will present the opening lecture in our Bong Joon-ho symposium, Bong 1-7, examining Bong’s central place in the resurgent Korean film industry of the early twenty first century.

Dal Yong Jin is the author of numerous books,Dal Yong Jin is the author of numerous books, including Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres (2022), Transnational Korean Cinema: Cultural Politics, Film Genres, and Digital Technologies (2019), Smartland Korea: mobile communication, culture and society (2017), and New Korean Wave: transnational cultural power in the age of social media (2016). Most recently, he co-edited The South Korean Film Industry (2024). Jin’s major research and teaching interests are on digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture.

You will be hard pressed to find any sentiment in Bong’s gleefully misanthropic view of a residential community that is also a microcosm of Korean society. “No animals were harmed in the making of this film,” reads the text that opens Barking Dogs Don’t Bite, but sensitive cynophiles should be warned that several dogs are abducted, imprisoned, killed, even butchered over the course of the film, as Bong takes the moral measure of his human characters by showing how they relate to their animal neighbours.

Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

The movie is by turns wacky, farcical and grimly realist.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian