As deliberate as Lee's other movies, but more focused and driven. Burning is not exactly a thriller, far too in love of its structural absences and ambiguities to quite build enough narrative momentum, but it is better shaped for suggesting one. It mixes two very old pulp tropes, the guy who meets a more succesful potentially sociopathic dude and can't fail to be enthralled by him (there's a lot of very good comedy of discomfort between Yoo and Yuen) and the vouyeristic investigation intended on implicatiting investigator and audience alike, but most use them to set a depiction of how a certain aimless youth can move towards resentment and social pathology. As such this feels essential, helped a lot not only Yoo's strong performance, but Lee's facility to get us into his headspace and the deliberate tenuous line that separate character and film's point of view.