In 'White Blast,' a bloody standoff at a snowed-in train station

Films these days tend to fall into one of two camps. The ones that are churned out in droves for streaming are lean, dopamine-chasing thrill rides meant to be devoured in one sitting. Meanwhile, movies made with the multiplex in mind keep getting bigger, with sprawling fictional universes and effects to match.

"White Blast" is an anomaly in that sense: a modest, 89-minute mystery that is headed for the big screen anyway. Set at a remote rail station in the snowbound mountains of Gangwon Province, the film follows aging stationmaster Gap-soo (Kim Yoon-seok) during his last day before retirement. A prison bus has crashed nearby, and the fugitives are on the loose. So when his purported successor, Hyeon-taek (Koo Kyo-hwan), turns up late in a blizzard, Gap-soo starts to wonder who he is really dealing with.

A longtime leading man in hits like "The Chaser" (2008) and "Noryang: Deadly Sea" (2023), Kim made the case that the short runtime works in the film's favor.

"You can see it even in pop songs. They used to run close to four minutes, but now a lot of them wrap up at two and a half," the actor said Thursday at a press conference in Seoul. "That tells you something about people's rhythm and energy these days. In that sense, brevity might be the film's biggest strength."

Bringing the film in at 89 minutes took a lot of thought, director Hong Eui-jeong ("Voice of Silence") said. "If you try too hard to explain a character's motive, the mystery loses steam. So I only gave hints of it."

Hong joined the project after the original director, Park Sun-woo, stepped down early for health reasons. Once she heard Kim and Koo were on board, she said she felt that she had to do it "one way or another." The two actors had last shared the screen in "Escape from Mogadishu" (2021).

Koo has been everywhere this year; "White Blast" is his fifth title of 2026. Asked about Kim, who is 14 years his senior, Koo recalled how his co-star helped him push through a tough monologue on set. "I was having a hard time, and he just told me to keep going," he said, calling Kim his "biggest cheerleader."

Kim, for his part, marveled at how smoothly Koo went from soft-spoken to menacing. "He'd stare right at me, like a dagger to the heart. Getting that from his eyes gave me chills," he said.

Not much about "White Blast" follows the playbook of a conventional thriller. The snowed-in isolation of the setting provides plenty of atmosphere, but this is a film that could not care less about why anyone's doing anything. With the two men growing paranoid for no good reason and coming to blows out of nowhere, the whole thing plays like absurdist theater for the most part; even the laughs pop up where you least expect them.

All of that may very well be deliberate. The film is adapted from a stage play, and its almost self-conscious staginess lends itself to an allegorical reading about a dog-eat-dog world in which the old and young fight over the same few jobs. The assured performance of the leads keeps that angle in view: Even at the tensest moments, their characters return again and again to the fear of being out of work, with Kim's gruff weariness and Koo's jittery insecurity hinting at what each man stands to lose.

Kim described Gap-soo as a man with nothing to fall back on. In Kim's view, Gap-soo's last line, "I've got nowhere to go," says it all. "It might be more than one man's problem," he said. "It could be where our whole society is headed." The actor called the film a story "about those who leave and those who stay," whether that means two generations or a father and a son.

Hong left the verdict to the viewers.

"How you feel depends on which character you relate to," she said. "I hope people enjoy it, and enjoy being a little confused, too."

"White Blast" opens in Korean theaters Wednesday.