Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

Once again, Lee has crafted a film of wondrous complexity and inscrutability. The more we see in Burning, the less sure we are of what we are watching.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

Burning is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Screen International by Tim Grierson

Once again, Lee has crafted a film of wondrous complexity and inscrutability. The more we see in Burning, the less sure we are of what we are watching.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

The whole film feels magical in the way it gets at intangible, invisible, ineffable things without naming them, and tells a gripping story of obsession at a poet’s pace, without need of conventional explanations.

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

It's a great film, engrossing, suspenseful, and strange.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.

Slate by Inkoo Kang

As Burning unfolds, it reveals new thematic layers until the film brims with allegorical potential.

Film Threat by Malik Adan

Like a brooding nightmare, Burning washes over audiences with passing visions of multiple lives, secrets and betrayals, all leading to no single, clean-cut or simple explanation.

The Playlist by Jordan Ruimy

Simmering with ambiguity, Burning plays its staging, writing, dialogue, acting, music, everything with carefully calibrated minimalism, but in turn it makes some grandiose statements. An unrecognizable murder-mystery Burning torches genre clichés and leaves a lasting, scorching blister.

The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd

Burning simmers. For nearly two-and-a-half perfectly measured hours, it turns up the heat without boiling over: a drama becoming a thriller in slow motion, intensifying little by little minute by minute, until finally it reaches a shocking, powerful crescendo.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Burning keeps twisting back on itself, charting the path of a man waking up to the world, only to find that it won’t stop messing with him.

Variety by Peter Debruge

The degree to which Burning succeeds will depend largely on one’s capacity to identify with the unspoken but strongly conveyed sense of jealousy and frustration its lower-class protagonist feels, coupled with a need to impose some sense of order on events beyond our control.

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

This is a beautifully crafted film loaded with glancing insights and observations into an understated triangular relationship, one rife with subtle perceptions about class privilege, reverberating family legacies, creative confidence, self-invention, sexual jealousy, justice and revenge.

The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor

Burning might not have a huge amount going on below its gorgeous surface, but it drags the viewer along with all the seductive intrigue of a frothy page-turner.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This is a gripping nightmare.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida

There is so much fascinating, underplayed tension running through Burning.... I was a little let down, then, when Burning lost its steam in its second half.