Peppermint Candy

1999, Lee Chang-dong, South Korea

Content Note: Suicide

Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy is a profound and prescient meditation on the Korean condition.  

The film opens with the protagonist’s suicide and illuminates the human consequences of the 1980s military dictatorship and 90s Asian financial crisis.  It sets its story in seven reverse-chronological episodes that show us how everyman Young-ho reached the point of jumping in front of a train, via brutal detours through his military, police and business stints.

Peppermint Candy should resonate with international audiences in a way it did not on its 1999 release – it was one of the movies that launched the new Korean cinema, along with Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area and Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, both of which screened in our programme last year. Korean recent history is more well-known than it once was thanks to the Hallyu wave of films, k-pop and k-drama, and the 2024 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to The Vegetarian author Han Kang.  More recently, the Korean Association of Film Critics anointed Lee’s 2018 triumph Burning (WFS 2024) as the best Korean film of all time, which has prompted a review and re-evaluation of his earlier works. And finally, the film is an excellent primer for anyone wanting a backgrounder to the political crisis of December 2024, where six hours of martial law provoked widespread outrage and (at the time of writing) the impeachment of both the elected president and later, his replacement as acting president.

“In contrast to many Korean productions that have drawn international acclaim for their depictions of extremes within society – Parasite and Squid Game being cases in point (or even that cinephile classic, Old Boy, with its a tale of extreme vengeance) – the poignancy Peppermint Candy lies in its uncompromising portrayal of the lot of the average South Korean man.” – Hannah Kang Walter, Cambridge Language Collective