Adapted to a length of two and a half hours from a Haruki Murakami short story,
Burning cannot be described as an easy film in any way. The lead character, an aimless lad fresh from university, with vague aspirations of becoming a writer, is an introvert who takes an eternity to express himself and when he falls for a complicated girl from his childhood, we watch him wait until too late to assert himself. She then disappears without trace, and the action he finally takes becomes trying to establish whether the smooth and inscrutable rich guy she befriended while on holiday abroad is behind it.
On the surface of it, this outline has the makings of a standard thriller. It confounds that at every turn. Not only are the usual markers for dream sequences entirely absent, but so too is the whole narrative support framework where turns in the plot are explained explicitly for our benefit, and there is no moral either. It takes some adjustment after being used to being fed so much pap to realise how unnecessary all of that is when the characters and events speak for themselves. The end result is quite haunting.
8/10
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