Matthew Turner | On 01, Apr 2023

Director: Byun Sung-hyun
Cast: Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Kim Si-A, Esom, Koo Kyo-hwan
Certificate: 15

Directed by Byun Sung-hyun, this stylish, entertaining thriller plays like a Korean spin-off from the John Wick franchise. Call it Jeon-wick – or don’t, if that’s a pun too far.

Jeon Do-yeon (who won Best Actress at Cannes for Secret Sunshine) plays middle-aged single mother Gil Bok-soon (see what they did there?), who has the tricky task of balancing a career as a skilled international assassin with raising her teenage daughter, Gil Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a). She works for a company called MK Ent, which has its own peculiar set of John Wick-esque rules for the way it conducts its business.

When Bok-soon transgresses one of those rules, she finds herself targeted by her own colleagues, as well as a multitude of other enemies. Meanwhile, Gil faces problems of her own, as her secret relationship with a female classmate makes her a target for blackmail from a fellow student.

Byun Sung-hyun sets out his stall early, opening the film with a terrific, lengthy sequence in which Bok-soon dispatches her latest target, opting to essentially challenge him to a duel on a closed-off section of a bridge. This also introduces the film’s key gimmick, which is that Bok-soon has the ability to play out various fight scenarios in her head, so she’ll often get killed off, only for the action to rewind to an earlier point.

That conceit really comes into its own, but it would be churlish to reveal any further details. Suffice it to say that the action throughout is exciting and inventive, occasionally heightened by digital effects.

Jeon Do-yeon is a joy to watch as Bok-soon, who seems more or less unflappable, at least when dealing with deadly assassins – not so much when dealing with her teenage daughter. Kim Si-a delivers an equally spirited performance as Gil and there’s colourful support from both Sol Kyung-gu as Bok-soon’s somewhat smitten boss, and from Esom, as his ruthless, wildly unpredictable younger sister, Cha Min-hee.

The script has a lot of fun with the set-up, particularly when Bok-soon attends lunches with the other school mums and they discuss “problems at work”, such as difficult colleagues, office rivalries and so on. In addition, the screenplay strikes an effective balance between the emotion of the mother-daughter plot (and its attendant coming-of-age story) and the blood-soaked thrills of the inter-office warfare.

This is a consistently enjoyable action thriller with a smart script, exciting fight scenes and a terrific central performance.

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