Barking Dogs Never Bite

Barking dogs don’t bite, but they severely irritate the young university lecturer Yoon-Ju. He spends a lot of time in his apartment, in a quiet high-rise district, that he shares with his pregnant wife. He has plenty of time to allow the background noise to annoy him. When he sees an old lady taking a dog for a walk, he is sure that this is the animal that annoys him so. He manages to kidnap the beast and locks it in the cellar of the apartment building. Some way off lives Hyun-Nam, who works as secretary at the local housing association. Hyun-Nam is bored stiff. Nothing happens in her life. When she sees a little girl in the area putting up a poster about her missing dog, she decides to help. She is sticking up posters everywhere, but more and more dogs disappear in the following days. One day through her binoculars she sees a man throw a dog from a block of flats across the road.Barking Dogs Never Bite is a tragi-comedy in which the novice director – one of the great talents of Korean cinema which is already having a very good year – manages to present bizarre developments as mundane. This precise and tranquil study about loneliness and communication problems turns out to be funny and, thanks to the inventive approach occasionally reminiscent of Manga films, is a joy to watch.