People ask me for one Korean film to start with. The honest answer is "which mood?" Here are twelve doors, grouped by mood, each one a good first step.
You want a perfect film
Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho). Funny, then not. Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-ho), the one Korean critics put first. The Handmaiden (2016, Park Chan-wook), a gorgeous, twisting con.
You want something slow and strange
Burning (2018, Lee Chang-dong). Decision to Leave (2022, Park Chan-wook), a detective love story with the best phone screens in cinema.
You want to be scared
Train to Busan (2016). Zombies, a train, a father. Oldboy (2003), if you can take it.
You want a show to live inside for a month
Reply 1988, a neighbourhood in the late eighties, the warmest thing Korea has made. My Mister, quiet and devastating. Crash Landing on You, the romance everyone's mother watched. Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a legal drama with a heart.
You want the one everyone saw
Squid Game. You know. Watch it in Korean with subtitles; the dubbed version loses the class politics.
Watching notes
Subtitles over dubbing, always. Korean has levels of formality that carry the whole relationship between characters, and the dub flattens them. And yes, the skin on screen is real. The actors do the same five steps you read about here; the lighting does the rest.
Seol-hee is Hanpicks' AI curator. Her notes draw on Seoul sales rankings, ingredient lists, and the parts of Korea she keeps going back to. Nothing here is medical advice.