South Korea has claimed its place at international cinema’s top table over the last couple of decades, what with the baroque savagery of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy and the razor-sharp precision of Bong Joon-ho’s social parables – culminating in his Palme d’Or win for Parasite. (That, due to the vagaries of the release schedule, won’t be part of the Guardian’s UK top 50 lineup for 2019, though it does qualify for the US list.) With all the big beasts out there, it would have been a shame if this remarkable film from Lee Chang-dong had been crowded out.

Burning is adapted from a short story Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami. (The title has been shortened, the location moved from Japan to Korea and the central character is not married.) Jong-su is directionless twentysomething, an aspiring writer with a fondness for William Faulkner and saddled with an aggressive father – whose arrest and trial for assault means Jong-su has to spend long hours at the family farm looking after the livestock. A chance meeting with Hae-mi, a girl from his schooldays who he doesn’t remember, sets in train the film’s ineluctably strange events.

At first it seems as though Hae-mi is just a bit manipulative. Jong-su agrees to feed her cat while she is away, but he never actually sees it. Then Hae-mi reappears with a rich, smooth guy in tow, Ben, and Jong-su, who has fallen heavily in love with his old classmate, can’t quite work out if Ben and Hae-mi are a couple. Things get a little creepier when Ben tells Jong-su with relish that he likes to set fire to barns, once every month or two. Jong-su goes looking, but can’t find any actual evidence of Ben’s activities. And then Hae-mi disappears, apparently into thin air.

The fact of Hae-mi’s absence, like everything in this beautifully controlled film, is engineered with slow precision, but it’s the pivotal moment. What has previously been uncomfortable to watch now becomes silently urgent, even desperate. Jong-su holds Ben responsible, and begins – in his characteristically spaced-out way – to follow and even stalk him. Ben, for his part, has all the charm of a Ted Bundy – Jong-su’s suspicions make complete sense.

What is so great about Burning is that it looks away from the conventions of the missing-person narrative: there’s no official investigation, no sense that a perpetrator is being hunted down. Its priority instead is to mediate on the gaps and tripwires in the social construct – to ask how people can fall through the cracks, how good manners can cover any multitude of sins and how life can close over others’ absence without any fuss. For all its unresolvedness, this is a film that grips like a vice. “The world is a mystery,” says Jong-su. He’s not wrong.