Sightlines · reception

How The Quiet Family was received

1998 · Kim Jee-woon · The Quiet Family on Sightlines

The arc

A modest black-comedy debut in 1998, it's since been rediscovered as the launchpad of the Korean New Wave — the film where Kim Jee-woon, Song Kang-ho, and Choi Min-sik all showed up before any of them were famous.

What’s debated

The perennial fight: is the original better than Takashi Miike's musical remake The Happiness of the Katakuris, or did Miike improbably out-weird it?

Its footprint

Its biggest cultural afterlife is secondhand — Miike remade it as the claymation-studded musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), making it one of the rare Korean films remade in Japan rather than the other way around.

Where it stands

A cult deep cut for Korean cinema completists — the 'go back to the debut' film once you've done A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil.

Did you know? It features Song Kang-ho and Choi Min-sik in the same cast a year before Shiri and five years before Oldbo­y made them international names — both were still largely unknown when it was made.