Hur Jin-ho's Chuseok tentpole turns the 1974 killing of the first lady into a slick newsroom thriller that never lets up
Don't let the title fool you: "The Assassin(s)" is no hitman picture. Director Hur Jin-ho's latest is the first Korean film set in the country's authoritarian past that puts the reporters who risked their lives going after the truth front and center.
What you get is a well-made journalism procedural based on the 1974 shooting that killed then-first lady Yuk Young-soo, one that has every chance of joining the ranks of recent politically forthright period hits like "1987" and "12.12: The Day." That it wrings this much tension, and now and then real emotion, out of what is essentially a conspiracy theory layered onto a well-documented event is a testament to some very assured filmmaking.
It opens like a standard crime thriller. The shooter (Park Jung-min) lands in Seoul with a revolver stashed in his bag and nearly gets caught at customs. As soon as customs lets him go, the camera promptly turns to the people about to get pulled into the mess. On the eve of Liberation Day, when strongman President Park Chung-hee is due to give his address, the action shifts to the newsroom of the fictional Dongsung Daily.
It's the old-school newsroom of the 1970s as you'd picture it: reporters banging out stories on typewriters in smoke-filled rooms and rushing to phone booths to call the desk. But then there's the ugly part — under Park's authoritarian rule, a day in the newsroom also meant the government handing down orders on what to write and what to leave out, and intelligence agents keeping watch around the clock, ready to storm in and rough up the staff over the wrong story.
Jae-hwan (Park Hae-il), the ever-composed social affairs editor, has already spent the morning fighting the censors when he makes the surprise call to send rookie Young-il (Lee Min-ho) — a nepo baby from a chaebol family — to cover the ceremony on his own. Across town, Chul-goo (Yoo Hae-jin), a good-humored precinct cop who happens to be one of Jae-hwan's regular tipsters, is running security at the National Theater. He stops a man without a security pass, exactly per protocol, but gets overruled on the spot by the presidential security chief (Uhm Tae-woong). So the shooter walks in, and the rest is history: the botched attempt, the president ducking behind the podium, the first lady hit instead, a schoolgirl caught in the crossfire as the bodyguards fire back. The moment is recreated faithfully to the record, nerve-shredding from start to finish.
Then the government does what governments like this typically do. Within hours, it announces the shooter acted on orders from a pro-North Korean group based in Japan and buries everything inconvenient about the case. That account, of course, doesn't square with what Young-il and Chul-goo saw with their own eyes: how the man got in, who killed the girl, how many shots rang out, whether he came alone. So Jae-hwan and his desk go to great lengths to piece it together, with their jobs, and possibly their lives, on the line, while Chul-goo runs his own investigation on the side and keeps feeding Jae-hwan what he finds. All of it under the shadow of a regime that has no qualms about torturing and killing its own citizens.
To bring back the 1970s here is to bring back the suffocating climate of brutality and violence that seeped into everyday life, and "The Assassin(s)" doesn't flinch on that front.
Chul-goo's unit gets scapegoated for the breach and beaten up by the security detail, and one of his men ends up in the regime's notorious torture cell. Over at the newsroom, a KCIA thug casually slaps journalists in the face, with a not-so-subtle warning that the presses could be shut down tomorrow. None of this is fantasy — the conspiracy at the core may have no basis in the record, but the world around it rings true in spirit, as any Korean who lived through those years will tell you. That grounding is what allows the film to convince, first and foremost, as a paean to brave men and women fighting a good but ultimately impossible fight.
There are stretches where the film gets carried away with its own sense of purpose, and you'd be unwise to expect it would forego the standard kit of the Korean crowd-pleaser: the frantic chases and beatdowns, the self-righteous speeches, the hand-wringing over ethics. In a lesser film that would sink the whole ship, but what keeps this one afloat is Hur's real interest in process over emotion, in the uphill fight of reporters seeking the truth. "The Assassin(s)" is that rare Korean film that at least reaches for the methodical, paper-trail kind of newspaper picture along the lines of "Spotlight" or "All the President's Men"; while it falls short of that ideal, the aspiration is honest and the execution captivating enough to keep you engaged. The detective work does get a bit convoluted in the back half, but the brisk editing and sure-handed direction carry you through with aplomb.
Park Hae-il is the procedural's virtues in human form, perpetually unperturbed on the surface but dogged underneath. Yoo Hae-jin, the most likable character actor in the business at the moment, handles the necessary crowd-pleasing work on the other end, bringing the pathos with his everyman charm. Lee Min-ho is, well, the obvious eye candy, playing the cheeky rookie. And then we have the cameos: A-list talent shows up here and there in the unlikeliest spots, and spotting them is a joy in itself.
"The Assassin(s)" opens in theaters Sept. 23, fresh off a gala premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Read our report on the 1974 assassination of first lady Yuk Young-soo below.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
