No less than three films I’ve seen in the past year have reckoned with mines. The final passage of Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt (2025) is an unbearably tense sequence in a minefield that offers little except shattered nerves and a vague sense that life is terrible. In Anurag Singh’s Border 2 (2026) , Sunny Deol’s Indian Army officer tussles with a Pakistani soldier while standing on a partly tripped mine. He slams the soldier down on it as he takes his boot off, is flung aside but miraculously survives, and taunts the onlooking Pakistani troops. Between daft heroism and cruel nihilism, both scenes felt frustrating.
In a film made 25 years before these, a soldier on another border trips a mine… and something beautiful happens. Out on night patrol, South Korean soldier Lee Soo-hyeok (Lee Byung-hun) stops to relieve himself. He finds himself face to face with a nervous North Korean soldier, Jung Woo-jin (Shin Ha-kyun), and a calmer, older one, Oh Kyeong-pil (Song Kang-ho). Worse, he partially trips a mine, and immediately freezes. Instead of leaving him there, the sergeant defuses the device and walks off, reprimanding his junior for having no intention of helping the man.
Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (2000) is set in the tensely monitored part of the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea where soldiers of both nations are stationed. After two North Korean soldiers are shot dead here, a Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission investigative team, led by Sophie E. Jean (Lee Young-ae), is called in. Soo-hyeok confesses to the killings; we’re also shown this in flashbacks from different perspectives. But the more Sophie probes, the less things add up.
As Sophie initially interviews soldiers on both sides—Soo-hyeok, his fellow soldier Nam Sung-sik (Kim Tae-woo) and Kyeong-pil—we have no inkling they know each other. In fact, until the scene with the mine, one of the film’s many flashbacks, Joint Security Area feels like a fairly conventional military drama. This changes after Kyeong-pil’s act of humanity, which moves Soo-hyeok so much he relays his thanks in a letter that he hurls over to the North Korean side. Kyeong-pil replies with his own missile. Soon, they’re forbidden pen pals. One night, Soo-hyeok turns up at their outpost, surprising Kyeong-pil and Woo-jin. They get along even better in person. Soo-hyeok brings Sung-sik on his sorties. The four men meet in the dead of night, smoke, listen to music, play games and eat American chocolates brought over by the South Koreans.
Those who associate Park Chan-wook with his more transgressive work might be surprised by the easy warmth of these scenes. This was his third film, though he prefers to call it his first, disavowing his first two features, neither of which was a hit with audiences or critics. Joint Security Area, though, was a huge success, becoming, for a brief time, the highest-grossing Korean film. It set Park on a path to becoming one of the signature directors of the new millennium. He’d reunite memorably with each of the three stars: Song Kang-ho in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Thirst (2009), Lee Young-ae in Lady Vengeance (2005), and Lee Byung-hun in a tour de force comic performance in his most recent film, No Other Choice (2025). Just as importantly, it marked the beginning of his still-ongoing partnership with Jo Yeong-wook, one the greatest director-composer pairs ever.
Joint Security Area doesn’t quite have the tart silkiness we’ve come to associate with Park. It’s a little rough around the edges. Some of the writing, especially the bits in English, is too blunt, and the performances by the Swiss investigators and Lee Young-ae aren’t on the level of the actors playing the soldiers. But it’s clearly the work of a director set to go far. Almost every scene has some satisfying filmmaking choice—a match cut, an unusual framing. There’s the first great Park scene transition: a top-down shot of a canopy replaced by a similarly shaped black umbrella. There’s the feeling of cinema as sleight-of-hand, revelations that change the complexion of what has come before. And though Park’s tendency towards formal preciseness is in evidence, you also sense a young director eager to break rules. A suicide is conveyed in a succession of quick, jarring shots that don’t fit together logically, but instead capture the emotional dislocation of the moment.
Anyone who’s been watching Hindi cinema closely over the last two decades should find Park’s subversion of political taboos fascinating. In the years since the film released, he’s talked about how he feared he might be arrested under the National Security Act, which in those days was invoked to limit favourable depictions of North Korea. Yet, Joint Security Area isn’t the least bit tentative in its pacifism, arguing wittily and emotionally for the humanity of both sides (and taking several swipes at America’s role in the conflict).
In 2013, there was a Hindi film called War Chhod Na Yaar, about a friendship between an Indian and a Pakistani officer on either side of the Line of Control. There’s enough to suggest the Korean film might be an inspiration—it too has a visiting fact-finder, a reporter played by Soha Ali Khan. Its unthreatening politics can be gauged from its cajoling title, yet even this simple plea would be impossible to get into theatres today. Ikkis (2026), a film that dared to show a friendship between Indian and Pakistani officers, had a disclaimer tacked on that read: “our neighbouring country is not trustworthy at all”.
Joint Security Area is haunted by death and history, but there’s also an optimism and lightness that shines through, down to the beautiful last shot. When Soo-hyeok first visits the North Koreans, Woo-jin, overcome by the gesture, stammers: “You’ve done a great thing. After half a century of division, you have breached our tragic history of agony and disgrace, broken the dam to reunify our country.” It’s played as comedy, but when Soo-hyeok is trying to convince Sung-sik to come over with him, he repeats it sincerely, ending with, “We’re gonna open the dam to reunification. Okay?” Sung-sik replies: “Could we maybe open it later?”
‘Joint Security Area’ is on Channel K, available via Amazon Prime.
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