Justin Chon

The camera in a Justin Chon film is seldom allowed to sit still. He shoots handheld and close, following the actor rather than waiting for them, and he has said he thinks of himself as an actor's director, more interested in the rehearsal and the conversation than in the shot. He came to directing after a decade of acting, in The O.C., House and the Twilight films, and it shows: his pictures are built around faces, usually Korean-American faces, usually in some trouble with a parent, a sibling or a government.

The features arrived out of Sundance in a run. Gook (2017), which he wrote, directed and starred in, is set against the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Ms. Purple (2019) follows estranged siblings in Koreatown. Blue Bayou (2021), in which he acted opposite Alicia Vikander, is about a Korean-American adoptee facing deportation. Then came Jamojaya (2023), a quieter film about a father and son in the music business, made after the reviews of Blue Bayou had called the earlier work melodramatic and overstuffed. Ante Cheng has photographed three of these, and the handheld closeness is as much his as Chon's.

We have written about only one of them, and it is the one where the heat is not a complaint. Chon directed four episodes of Pachinko, alongside Kogonada, and the series follows a Korean family from a fishing village near Busan under Japanese rule to a Tokyo bank in 1989. The Busan chapters got at us more than we expected. The past is built with such patience, a look held before a line is spoken, that when the story jumps forward to 1989 we resented leaving, and the present never quite catches up. How much of that is Chon and how much Kogonada we cannot say episode by episode, which is a compliment to both of them.

That is the pattern the dossier of his career suggests and the one we would bet on. Given a story large enough to hold it, his closeness to actors and his willingness to let a scene go all the way up are virtues. Given a story the size of one family in one flat, the same habits can tip over into shouting. He has said he leads with his heart, and nobody who has sat through his work would dispute it. The question is what the head is doing meanwhile.

He has since moved to television scale again with Chief of War (2025), where the camera has to share the frame with landscape. Watch Pachinko first, since that is where we can vouch for him. Then see whether the quieter Chon of Jamojaya was a new direction or a rest between rounds.