The best Bong Joon-Ho movies: What to watch after Mickey 17

Mickey 17 marks Bong Joon-ho’s triumphant return to cinema screens some six years on from his breakout hit, Parasite.

Robert Pattinson leads a star-studded cast in this biting sci-fi satire about a dystopian cloning program. In Bong’s grimly humorous future, human beings – or rather their clones – are treated as disposable test subjects.

Even if you've yet to see it, y won't be surprised to hear it's been getting glowing reviews.

You see, Bong Joon-ho is one of the most consistent filmmakers working today. Across his seven films to date (not including Mickey 17), he’s scarcely put a foot wrong.

This despite the fact that the 55-year-old director from Daegu rarely settles in the same place. He’s covered true(ish) crime, creature horror, noirish thrillers, and of course sci-fi – all with lashings of signature black humour and a strong sense of class consciousness.

Mickey 17 is only the third of Bong’s films to be shot using Western actors, but all are extremely accessible, highly entertaining productions. We’d recommend tracking them all down through whatever streaming or rental service that hosts them.

While we ruminate on exactly where we're going to pop Mickey 17 on this best-of list, here’s a little rundown of what makes each of Bong Joon-ho’s other movies so great.

7. Barking Dogs Never Bite

Bong Joon-ho’s debut arrived in the year 2000, showcasing a talent that was already starting to take its final form. The director’s bitingly black sense of humour, quirky twists, and fascination with the struggling underclass are all here to see straight from the off.

Lee Sung-jae stars as Ko Yun-ju, a hard-up academic who lives in a crumbling apartment block with his pregnant wife. After the stresses and strains of his precarious position lead him to take drastic action against a yapping dog, a fateful set of events are set in motion.

6. Memories of Murder

For his second film, Bong Joon-ho produced a neo-noir crime thriller based loosely on a series of grizzly murders that took place in rural South Korea during the late ’80s. Thanks to the combination of a lack of resources and questionable professionalism from some of the local police, the murders go unsolved, prompting a big city detective to get involved.

This isn’t your Hollywood whodunit, as our increasingly mismatched detective partners continue to grasp at straws and pursue dead ends. It’s truly haunting stuff.

5. The Host

Here’s another about turn from Bong Joon-ho, as he takes his first stab at something more fantastical. The Host is a monster movie, but with the complex characterisation and unexpected plot developments that we’ve now come to expect of the director.

When a grotesque creature emerges from the Han river and starts chowing down on the citizens of Seoul, a poor local family is dragged into the mayhem. This being a Bong Joon-ho film, there’s also a sharp political swipe at the ruling powers – this time in the form of a careless US military.

4. Mother

Mother sees Bong Joon-ho returning to dark crime thriller territory, albeit without the queasy factual basis of Memories of Murder. This time the story is a much more personal one, centring on Kim Hye-ja’s titular mother. When her mentally impaired son is accused of murdering a local girl, she sets out to find the real killer.

Featuring familiar Bong Joon-ho themes of poor people fighting against a cruel and uncaring system, and a memorable lead performance from Kim, this is an easily overlooked Bong effort that deserves its time in the sun.

3. Snowpiercer

Bong’s first brush with Hollywood didn’t exactly produce the kind of runaway success that his talent warranted. That’s a shame, because Snowpiercer is one of the most original pieces of sci-fi cinema released in the past 12 years.

It’s based on a French graphic novel that sees the remnants of humanity crammed into a giant train perpetually circumnavigating a climate-ravaged Earth. Chris Evans’s taciturn hero leads a thrillingly brutal lower class rebellion against the wealthier inhabitants, culminating in a tense face-off with Ed Harris’s reclusive dictator.

2. Okja

If Bong Joon-ho was stung by Hollywood’s ludicrous treatment of Snowpiercer, he had the last laugh by taking Netflix’s money and producing Okja. Another multi-lingual sci-fi treat with a clear ecological message, it follows the travails of a genetically engineered ‘super pig’ and its doting young companion.

Co-written by Britain’s own Jon Ronson, Okja is packed full of humour, larger than life characters (played by a star-filled cast), and thrilling action. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll find on the world’s biggest streaming service.

1. Parasite

We hesitate slightly to label Parasite as Bong Joon-ho’s greatest work, which tells you something in itself. This was, after all, the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Our indecisiveness is a testament to the director’s impeccable body of work than any slight on Parasite’s quality, however, which marks a rare case of the Academy Awards getting things spot on. Its depiction of a poor, morally flexible family exploiting their wealthy employers is dark, funny, and poignant. Classic Bong Joon-ho fare, in other words.

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