One of the most beautiful scenes in a movie this year — in many years — comes midway through “Burning.” Two men and a woman are lazing around outside a home. They’re in the South Korean countryside, near the border with North Korea, where the squawk of propaganda drifts in and out from loudspeakers. Now, though, in the velvety dusk light, the sound of Miles Davis’s ethereal trumpet fills the air, and the woman begins swaying, taking off her shirt. She is dancing for the men, but mostly she’s dancing in what feels like ecstatic communion between her and the world.

Desire, ravenous and ineffable, shudders through “Burning,” the latest from the great South Korean director Lee Chang-dong. Set in the present, the movie involves the complicated, increasingly fraught relationships among three characters whose lives are tragically engulfed as desire gives way to rage. The story has the quality of a mystery thriller — somebody goes missing, somebody else tries to figure out why — one accompanied by the drumbeat of politics. The larger, more agonizing question here, though, involves what it means to live in a divided, profoundly isolating world that relentlessly drives a wedge between the self and others.