Lee Chang-dong understood surveillance before the platforms weaponized it: the watcher and the watched collapse into a single obsessive consciousness.
Jong-su doesn't need external cameras — he provides them himself, documenting Haemi's movements, her phone, her apartment layouts, her routines, her class position, her availability.
The film's aesthetic isn't about voyeurism as transgression. It's about how documentation becomes desire becomes proof becomes accusation.
The precision matters. The Indy film stock, the naturalistic long takes that feel like security footage, the way Lee holds shots of empty spaces as if duration itself could transform observation into ownership — when Haemi disappears, Jong-su's documentation becomes indictment. But against whom?
It gets one thing wrong that matters more: it still imagines a human agent — Haemi, Ben — at the other end. By 2023, there is no Ben. There's only the mechanism, and Jong-su is both the watched and the watcher, alone in the data he's producing.
Watch the scene where Jong-su photographs Haemi's underwear (around 37 minutes in), then immediately rewatch the greenhouse sequence near the film's end—same aesthetic, same precision, but now the object is gone. Notice how the cinematography doesn't change. Notice what that means.
Read Brian Mcinerney's essay 'Burning as a Film About Narrative Ownership' in Film Quarterly (2020), which traces how Lee uses POV to collapse the distinction between documentation and accusation—it directly addresses the mechanism the article argues for.