Film review: Kill Boksoon

It's not easy to juggle motherhood with being an assassin in the Netflix film Kill Boksoon. Photo / Netflix

Kill Boksoon (M, graphic violence, 137 mins) Now streaming on Netflix. In Korean with subtitles. Dubbed option available.

Directed by Byun Sung-hyun

‘‘Kill Bok-soon’ is a terrific K-drama about a range of attractive, sometimes even beautiful people, who kill for a living, but the way viewers are let inside the characters’ imaginations lifts the film to a level above most crime capers. Somehow we come to believe killing for a living might even make some sort of bizarre sense. It’s a fast-paced film, really well scripted, showing Korea’s underbelly and also its sophistication.

The opening sequence establishes the tone brilliantly: in a downtown Seoul railway yard, current time, a smart assassin on a mission, Gil Bok-soon (Jeon Do-yeon, famous in Korea on a Meryl Streep level), gets the better of a top Japanese swordsman. Zappy dialogue lets us in on the underworld in which Bok-soon operates, introducing the competing companies that employ assassins, who in turn compete for work with the underclass unemployed.

Bok-soon seems, at first, to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work, but all the same, she quickly gets us onside. She’s highly skilled, absolutely in control, used to success. She’s clearly too good at her job to fail, even when her weapon of choice is a humble axe purchased from a warehouse, while her opponent wields a centuries old samurai sword. She draws us in, particularly when she projects herself into possible futures, after seeing death in her victims’ eyes, and then shows her vulnerability as a mother. She has depth.

Boss of killing agency MK Ent, Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), takes Bok-soon to tteokbokki lunch, as delicious to look at as the kimchee Bok-soon expertly prepares in her state of the art kitchen. Bok-soon unloads about her 15 year old daughter Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a). “She used to follow me around when I came home, and she’d tell me about school… Now she’s always in her room with the door closed. She has all these secrets.” How ironic is that, when Jae-yeong thinks her mother’s an event planner, but has no idea what kind of events she stages.

A successful debut for director Byun Sung- Hyun, no doubt inspired by ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’(2022), but without any portals to a multiverse and with irony at every level. Nothing is what it seems. Not even assassins are safe inside the MK Ent downtown tower: Cha Min-kyu’s sinister sister is the manager from hell. Bok-soon’s young lover, Koo Kyo-huan (Han Hee Sung), a skilled assassin who seems invincible, lets his feelings get in the way. Jae-yeong prefers girls, and has to come out to Bok-soon after a social media issue forces her to. “Killing other people is easier than raising a kid,” says Bok-soon.

Speaking with Time magazine’s Laura Zornose on 31 March 2023, Jeon said the film is close to her own mothering.

“At times a single thing (my daughter) says can give me a big lesson … At times I would be at a loss for words.”

Bok-soon is a believable mother as well as a committed killer. Escapism with a difference.

Highly recommended.

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