10 great South Korean sci-fi films

If science fiction is one of the great artistic tools for making sense of our present, by speculating on our future or worlds beyond our own, so too can sci-fi cinema be used to examine the ongoing health and potential prospects of the medium.

Sci-fi films weren’t completely absent from the cinematic output of South Korea prior to the new millennium. But perhaps thanks to the genre’s suitability for weaving in political commentary on modern times, government censorship restrictions on the South Korean film industry in the decades prior to the democratic reforms of the late 1980s may have played a part in their infrequency; the most notable examples of South Korean sci-fi cinema prior to the 1990s are a few animated films and the kaiju movie Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967).

As filmmaking restrictions were loosened in the 1990s, industry conglomerates like Samsung also began investing in the South Korean movie business, leading to infrastructures that provided a solid footing for the country’s talent to compete more effectively on the world stage. This, unsurprisingly, involved a significant focus on mainstream blockbusters (like smash hit thriller Shiri (1999)), with sci-fi benefitting, even if the trappings were often blended with other genres. (See, for example, 2009: Lost Memories (2002), a conspiracy action-thriller in which the Korean Peninsula is still part of Imperial Japan due to a time-travel incident 100 years earlier.)

Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi/action spectacle Hope, in which residents of a remote village battle with giant monsters of potential cosmic origin, has proven one of 2026’s buzziest titles since it premiered in Cannes’ main competition. With the creature feature now playing in UK cinemas, here we explore its South Korean sci-fi lineage, in films both explosive and compellingly cerebral.

Director: Moon Seung-wook

In the near future, a German resident of Korean descent returns to her homeland in pursuit of something to ease the great pain and loss she feels. Anna (Kim Ho-jung, who won Best Actress at Locarno) wants to catch the ‘oblivion virus’ that’s swept South Korea (concurrently with acid rain and an epidemic of lead poisoning), which erases the memories of those who make contact with it. As it’s almost impossible to predict where the virus may strike next (beyond white butterflies appearing as hints), a whole tourism industry has emerged – think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) if you had to hire a guide and go on a road trip to reap the ‘benefits’.

Moon Seung-wook was apparently the first Korean-born foreign student to study at Poland’s renowned Lodz Film School. There are conflicting reports about whether he also studied with the school’s alum Krzysztof Kieślowski at some point, but you can definitely decipher traces of Three Colours: Blue (1993), especially, infusing Moon’s second feature. ‘Decipher’ is a key word here because The Butterfly was, at the time, a quite pioneering work in the Korean independent scene, for how Moon explored the unique textural possibilities of digital video – including the format’s mobility and potential for improvised staging. The latter is demonstrated in a remarkable birth sequence that takes place in a body of water, where the camera gets up close, personal and a little soaked with the film’s three lead actors in one long, unbroken take. This is a soulful, moving film that’s ripe for rediscovery.

Director: Jang Sun-woo

Let us be flexible with the term ‘great’ for a moment, for it might be argued that even very messy works can still be deemed essential texts when analysing a national cinema’s history with a genre. Especially when there are some undeniably fascinating swings here, involving the translation of labyrinthine video-game storytelling and visual logic to movies.

Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, this cyberpunk film portrays a virtual reality game in which players compete to ensure that the title character freezes to death, as she does in the original story; whoever the girl is fondly thinking of as she dies wins the game and a mysterious prize. Delivery boy Ju (Kim Hyun-sung) enters the game with the hope of dating the Little Match Girl (Lim Eun-kyung), who resembles someone he encounters in the real world.

Made on a then-well-above-industry standard budget of 11 billion won (over £6 million), Resurrection of the Little Match Girl cratered at the Korean box office to a degree reminiscent of Heaven’s Gate (1980) in the United States, in that its commercial performance – it made back well under a tenth of its production cost – served as a notorious cautionary tale that affected what else got greenlit and funded to a certain scale. Formerly a director of largely arthouse fare (Bad Movie (1997), Lies (1999)), Jang Sun-woo hasn’t made another movie since.

Director: Min Byung-chun

If some Korean blockbuster hopefuls have occasionally been accused of too openly aping their western counterparts, Natural City does itself few favours by quite explicitly mimicking a few of the most famous shots from Blade Runner (1982). Pastiche is not a crime, of course, and director Min Byung-chun’s handsomely mounted cyborg saga is highly entertaining in its own right, aided by particularly tactile production design and some of the cleaner choreography from the global wave of films that were very much trying to evoke the specific action style of The Matrix (1999) – itself a pastiche heavily in debt to what came before.

Director: Jang Joon-hwan

If you haven’t seen or don’t know anything about this film, you may be more familiar with its recent English-language remake, Bugonia (2025), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos – a movie that Save the Green Planet! director Jang Joon-hwan was apparently also set to helm himself at one point.

And if you’ve seen Bugonia in full, you can guess why the original version’s inclusion on this list could constitute a spoiler. That said, even without any narrative developments that may occur in the movie’s back half, this darkly comic thriller about a conspiracy theorist kidnapping and torturing a pharmaceutical executive, whom he’s convinced is guilty of great misdeeds, could qualify as sci-fi based on its otherworldly atmosphere alone.

Director: Kim Moon-saeng

To loop back to Natural City for a moment, there’s an extent to which Sky Blue (also known as Wonderful Days outside of the UK) can also be a little derivative in places, more so with its slightly thin narrative concerning a post-apocalyptic city whose government pursues eco-damaging energy resources at the expense of anyone living beyond its borders. But this is an often-beautiful movie that’s more an experience to soak in, rather than pull apart for lacking certain world-building details. 

Incorporating the same photo-realistic CGI methods as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) for many of its environments, but opting for traditional 2D animation for the characters interacting with those backdrops, there are few films that look quite like this one in motion – a wordless motorcycle ride through rainy wastelands early on is especially gorgeous.

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Ageing like a fine wine, Bong Joon Ho’s gloriously entertaining blockbuster is among the very finest creature features of the 21st century. If tonally very different with its specific form of humour, the film strikes a similarly perfect balance of drama, political commentary and rollercoaster ride as Jaws (1975), while the spectacle with the mutated monster, evoking a smaller-scale Godzilla movie, plays like gangbusters.

The underlying theme of reckless American interference in another nation causing rippling, widespread damage to a population resonated strongly in the mid-2000s. But the institutional paralysis on display, in the face of both preventable tragedy and viral outbreaks, is now just as potent in the 2020s.

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige and featuring a mix of South Korean (Song Kang-ho, Ko Asung) and English-speaking stars (Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt), Bong’s next sci-fi after The Host reportedly had the then-largest ever budget for a film with Korean backing. Despite the director’s famous clashes with Harvey Weinstein over which cut of the film would be released and how, this post-apocalyptic parable about class warfare and climate change proved a wise investment for those involved. One of the more enduring sci-fi/action hybrids from this century, the film also inspired a television series that lasted four seasons – though with no onscreen presence for Korean performers that time around.

Director: Lee Chung-hyun

Horror filmmakers love phone calls. From Black Christmas (1974) through Scream (1996) and the advent of mobile phones, there’s always tension to be wrung from the intimacies of threats being delivered right to your ears. With The Call, director Lee Chung-hyun presents a great sci-fi-infused hook: what if the spooky calls on your landline were coming from inside the house, but it’s your house 20 years ago?

What can or should be done to change the past to create a better future is one of the tried-and-true dilemmas of time-travel fiction. The Call explores this to thrilling ends, as the young woman who intervenes in forthcoming tragedy in 1999 creates a new timeline for 2019, but one where her own continued existence – having been warned of her early death by the caller further ahead – triggers a ripple effect of harm.

Director: Um Tae-hwa

Not all disaster movies overlap with science fiction, but when the two do meet, they can prove an ideal match, thanks to both genres’ recurring interest in how humans respond to large-scale threats to survival and a perceived lack of hope. Playing like a slick hybrid of the sci-fi show Lost (2004-2010) and J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, this thriller follows survivors of a cataclysmic earthquake that destroys Seoul, who form an isolationist society in the only apartment complex that’s managed to stay intact. If the rest of the country, or even the world, has made it through this titanic event, word is not reaching anyone left in the city – nor is help, it would seem.

Sharp in exploring how authoritarianism can flourish in crises, Concrete Utopia is one of the most riveting disaster movies of recent memory, with a compelling turn by Lee Byung-hun as an opportunist who seizes a leadership role and stirs fanaticism. The film spun off a standalone sequel for distributor Netflix, Badland Hunters (2024), which is a somewhat more traditional post-apocalyptic action film starring Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee).

Director: Park Syeyoung

This list began with one of its most formally experimental entries, and it ends that way, too – this time with an indie that plays with the possibilities of hazy saturation for digital photography. Set in a speculative, post-unification Korea, The Fin explores the relationship between brainwashed citizens and the exploited, mutant underclass beyond their erected walls, whom the humans have been trained to hate and abuse.

As a consequence of ecological devastation, some of the Korean population has undergone physical mutations that have led them to resemble sea creatures, complete with – you guessed it – fins. To pass in one of the various colonies (where clean water is a precious commodity), these ‘Omegas’ might cut off their mutated appendages, or hide them with prosthetics. At great risk to his own life (given propaganda that suggests their screams can kill), one such Omega infiltrates East Colony 114 with a mission to deliver a message to one specific young woman, all while pursued by a novice recruit to a government taskforce – the latter beginning to have doubts about the state’s ideology and the rampant contagion of fear.