Gongjak

The real-life story of a South Korean secret agent tasked with infiltrating North Korean leaders in the 1990s for political and war espionage and obtaining information confirming the existence of North Korea's nuclear program. He is disguised as a businessman with government secrets and offering marketing promotion for North Korean products to its southern neighbours. The story is eventful and extremely complex and dynamic, and it requires at least a basic orientation in a political and geographical context, because there is no time for much explanation. The creators, led by a more than capable director and screenwriter and the right cast, handle this period spy thriller sovereignly and practically flawlessly. The film has a thrillingly progressive plot, built largely on dramatically tight business and political meetings between the main protagonists and North Korea's government elites. The creators elevate to another level the exceptionally perfect passages from the meetings with absolute ruler Kim Jong-il, and from North Korean cities, where communist misery mixes with distress against the background of imperially magnificent exteriors. This is in all respects a great film about the fundamental changes in the relationship of the two countries on the Korean Peninsula to capitalism and to each other (however, what is happening in the south is not as engaging as what is happening in the north), about political decisions in the highest places and about life in a country where expressing political disagreement means risking your life. (10.10.2018)

Korean kind of Le tsar movie. In other words, a spy thriller about agreements concluded behind the closed doors, “wag a dog" and the infiltration of the other party through papers and trade agreements. What would have fitted this movie more is more refinement, less relieving one-liners (they are funny, but they don't match, not even remotely), more focus on silence, tension arising from the situation and the unspoken. It would have been better to slow the pace down occasionally and not to race forward like an action movie. In any case, even so excellent, culminating and with a typically South Korean emotional engagement, which in the final part pays off through the non-genre unexpectedly strong B-romance of the “south and the north". (22.03.2019)

After Kundo: Age of the Rampant, Yoon Jong-bin serves up another historical spy-themed drama with a perfect performance by Jeong-min Hwang, but for my taste the film was rather tedious and didn't offer enough interesting sequences for the given running time. There were suspenseful and interesting sequences when meeting the leader, but there weren't that many of those. Nicely shot, well acted and definitely an interesting insight into the political situation in North and South Korea. I'm not the target audience, so a neutral three. 60%. (29.10.2019)