Barking Dogs Never Bite

Barking Dogs Never Bite (, also known as A Higher Animal and Dog of Flanders) is a 2000 South Korean independent dark comedy film directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho in his directorial debut. The film's Korean title is satirically named after the 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders, a European pet story that is very popular in parts of East Asia. Barking Dogs Never Bite stars Lee Sung-jae as an out-of-work college professor who is irritated by the sound of barking dogs in his apartment building and resorts to kidnapping and killing them. Meanwhile, a young woman who works at the apartment complex (played by Bae Doona) decides to investigate the matter after she starts receiving notices from tenants about the missing dogs. Plot Ko Yun-ju, an unemployed academic, lives in a large apartment complex with his pregnant wife Eun-sil. He is struggling to become a university professor and grappling with his strained relationship with Eun-sil. Searching for the loudly barking dog of one of his neighbors, which is driving him crazy, he finds an unattended Shih Tzu. He tries to drop the dog from the roof, but hesitates and is stopped when an old woman comes to dry radishes there. He takes the dog into the basement instead and, after being unable to hang it, locks it inside a cabinet. Park Hyun-nam, the lazy bookkeeper and custodian of the apartment complex, longs to be famous like a bank teller she and her friend Yoon Jang-mi saw on TV who was rewarded for stopping a robbery. A little girl comes to Hyun-nam with flyers she wants to hang up in order to find her missing dog, the Shih Tzu. Yun-ju continues to hear barking, and sees the old woman from the roof with her Min Pin, the actual source of the noise. He reads on the flyer for the missing dog that it was unable to bark because of a throat operation. Realizing his mistake, he goes to the basement at night to free the dog from the cabinet, but hides when a janitor comes in. Yun-ju watches in horror as the janitor pulls out the dead Shih Tzu and prepares to eat it.