Joint Security Area (2000) on Netflix
NR20001h 50mActionDramaThrillerWar
A shooting at a Northern guard house in the Demilitarized Zone leaves two North Korean soldiers dead. Sergeant Lee Soo-hyeok, a South Korean, flees south, and Major Sophie E. Jean investigates.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.7/1039,577 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
At a Northern guard house in the Joint Security Area, across the Bridge of No Return, two North Korean soldiers are killed, and a wounded South Korean sergeant, Lee Soo-hyeok, is picked up by his own troops after the two sides exchange fire. Soo-hyeok has confessed to the shootings, but when Swiss Army Major Sophie E. Jean arrives to investigate the incident for the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, the accounts she collects do not match. Soo-hyeok says he was taken north and freed himself; the North Korean survivor, Sergeant Oh Kyeong-pil, says Soo-hyeok walked in and shot everyone. The autopsy reports show that one of the dead, Jeong Woo-jin, was hit eight times, and that a single bullet cannot be accounted for.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Joint Security Area (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For Joint Security Area, the film's Korean Demilitarized Zone was not shot on location: the production built the DMZ as a set, roughly an 8,000-pyeong area inside a film studio in Namyangju, at a cost of 900 million won.
- Park Chan-wook had largely disowned his first two films, The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream (1992) and Trio (1997), so Joint Security Area is often called his first film with creative control, and the director himself prefers it be regarded as his directorial debut.
- Joint Security Area became the highest-grossing film in South Korean history, holding that record until Friend (2001) surpassed it the following year, and its success launched Park Chan-wook's career.
