DIRECTOR Kim Jee-woon (I Saw the Devil, A Tale of Two Sisters) is one of the finest, most stylistically assured filmmakers working in his native South Korea today. Now he delves into the complex and fascinating past of his homeland for this gripping espionage thriller, a time in the late 1920s when Korea was still one nation and under the stranglehold of Japanese rule.
Lee Jung-Chool (Song Kang-ho) is a conflicted Korean-born captain in the Japanese police tasked with rooting out members of the Korean Resistance of which he used to be a member. They will stop at nothing to see their country free, including smuggling explosives from Shanghai into Seoul in an attempt to destroy key Japanese facilities.
The head of the Resistance group is Jeong Che-san (Lee Byung-hun), a fiercely determined and calculating leader who sees an opportunity to turn Lee to their side.
This slickly made game of cat-and-mouse is another thrilling and absorbing effort from Kim, a taut guessing game of a film that brilliantly sustains suspense throughout its hefty 140-minute runtime, one that’s heartfelt without ever being sentimental and entirely unafraid of bloodshed in its carefully placed action set-pieces and brutal torture sequences.
There’s skilful method in the chaotic madness of the shootout scenes in particular – a lot may be unfolding on-screen but you’re always completely clear where everyone is, an increasing rarity these days – exhibiting both a disorientating quality and a visceral power that makes you wince as much as you can’t take your eyes off them.
The film benefits massively from its cast, which includes nothing short of two superstars of Korean cinema in Lee Byung-hun and Song Kang-ho, as well as Gong Yoo (last year’s zombie-filled box office smash Train to Busan) as troubled key Resistance fighter Kim Woo-Jin and Han Ji-min as the striking heroine of the Resistance, Yeon Gye-Soon, who holds her own in a male-dominated landscape.
They help make these people caught between country and duty, obligation and principal, national loyalty and survival feel like a genuine part of history with a lot to lose and everything to gain – “I’m a soldier who lost his country,” Jeong remarks at one point – rather than thinly drawn caricatures.
A keen sense of time and place authentically whisks us back into the past and there’s a palpable atmosphere dripping with deception and uncertainty to keep the audience on their toes. It brings to mind Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in its exploration of deep distrust masked by appeasement while evoking Park Chan-wook’s JSA: Join Security Area – a crime mystery set on the border between the now split nation – in its dense handling of a very complex time in Korean history.
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