Lee Hae-jun makes comedies about people the city has stopped looking at, and at his best, in Castaway on the Moon, the joke and the sadness arrive in the same shot. The bigger his films get, the less of him there is in them.
Fi1m perspective
Mr Kim jumps from a bridge over the Han River, fails to die, and washes up on a wooded island directly beneath it, close enough to the city to read the lettering on the blocks of flats. His phone has enough life for one call. The 119 emergency line decides he is joking and hangs up. That is Lee Hae-jun in one scene: a man cut off from a city that is not looking, played first for laughs and then held long enough for the sadness to come through.
He arrived by writing. Through the early 2000s he was a screenwriter on Conduct Zero (2002), Au Revoir, UFO (2004) and Antarctic Journal (2005). His first feature as director, Like a Virgin (2006), was shared with Lee Hae-young, a coming-of-age story about a transgender teenager that he and his co-director handled with a care the subject did not then routinely get. Three years later came Castaway on the Moon (2009), on his own, written as well as directed, and the whole of his interest laid out in a single premise.
It is still the film to see. Lee asks a plain question, what does a marooned man do in sight of a city, and he answers it patiently, giving Jung Jae-young's Mr Kim a recluse with a camera for his only audience. We laughed when the emergency line hung up on him, and felt a little ashamed a moment later, because the film had already shown us he meant the jump. That is the trick Lee does better than almost anyone working in this register: the comedy is the sadness, seen from slightly further away. Our one reservation is the ending, which leans on a coincidence the film has not earned.
The next solo film, My Dictator (2014), put a struggling theatre actor in the part of Kim Il-sung's body double, and Lee has said he wanted it to be a story about the lives of fathers who lived through those times. Kim Byung-seo shot it. Five years on, Lee and Kim co-directed Ashfall (2019), a disaster film on a scale nothing in his earlier work hinted at, and the reviews so far agree he can stage a large action sequence so that you know where everyone is. They also note how much of it is borrowed from the Hollywood disaster picture. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it further here, except to say that the man who put one person on an island does not seem to be the one in charge of it. In between he wrote for other directors, on A Hard Day (2014) and Golden Slumber (2018), and the producer Kim Moo-ryoung has stayed with him across three films.
As of 2026 he is attached to direct the Solo Leveling television series. If you want to know what he is for, start with the island, and watch whether any of it survives the move to scale.
Biography
Lee Hae-jun is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. Born on 18 August 1973 in Seoul, he studied advertising at the Seoul Institute of the Arts before entering the film industry as a screenwriter.
His early screenplay credits include Conduct Zero (2002), Au Revoir, UFO (2004) and Antarctic Journal (2005). In 2006 he co-wrote and co-directed the coming-of-age film Like a Virgin. He made his solo directorial debut with Castaway on the Moon (2009), which he also wrote.
Subsequent work includes directing and writing My Dictator (2014) and Ashfall (2019), and screenplays for A Hard Day (2014, adaptation) and Golden Slumber (2018). He has received awards including Best New Director and Best Screenplay for Like a Virgin.
