Lee is practically unmatched in the contemporary cinematic landscape when it comes to how literary his films are, with thematic layers upon layers like a crepe cake made to make you ill. He's playing three-dimensional chess while the rest of us are just trying to catch up.

"Burning succeeds because it’s an endless fractal of questions that you can answer both ways. It isn’t the kind of mystery that leaves things deliberately ambiguous for viewers to debate toward an answer — which is to say, it isn’t a puzzle. A puzzle assumes that if you look carefully enough, there is a missing piece you can find and fill in to get the whole picture. Burning meanwhile, has two pieces for every empty space, so you can complete the picture however you like, and how you end up filling it in says something about you."

More thoughts here.