New World: The Korean Infernal-Affairs Epic

Everyone sells New World as the Korean Infernal Affairs, and the shorthand is doing the film a disservice that has followed it for twelve years. Yes, there is a policeman living inside a crime organisation. Yes, he has been there long enough that the cover has grown into the skin. But Park Hoon-jung is not especially interested in the mole thriller’s usual pleasures — the near-misses, the phone that rings at the wrong moment, the two men in a room each wondering about the other. He gets those out of the way in the first act.

What he actually wants to film is a succession. New World is a corporate drama in which the corporation happens to be a crime syndicate, the board happens to be composed of men who have killed people, and the vote happens to be lethal. It is Succession with knives, made two years before Succession, by a man who had recently written I Saw the Devil and clearly wanted a rest from screaming.

Eight years under

The Goldmoon Group is Korea’s largest criminal organisation, and it is structured like a chaebol: chairman, executives, subsidiaries, a legal department. When the chairman dies in a car accident in the opening reel, the leadership passes to a vote, and the two candidates are the two men who have spent their careers not killing each other.

Lee Ja-sung, played by Lee Jung-jae, is Goldmoon’s number three and one of its most trusted executives. He is also a police officer. He was inserted into the organisation eight years ago by Section Chief Kang Hee-cheol, played by Choi Min-sik, and he has been down there ever since — long enough to have married, long enough for his wife to be pregnant, long enough for the police to have become the people who ring him at inconvenient hours and the gangsters to have become the people he eats with.

Kang’s plan is called Operation New World, and it is exactly as cynical as it sounds: the police will not dismantle Goldmoon. They will decide who runs it. Kang wants his man on the throne, and Ja-sung, who has been promised an exit at the end of every year for eight years, is being told that the exit has moved again.

Standing between the police and the outcome are the two candidates. Lee Joong-gu, played by Park Sung-woong, is the pure predator: humourless, ambitious, and correct about almost everything, which makes him the most dangerous person in the film. And Jung Chung, played by Hwang Jung-min, is Ja-sung’s sworn brother — a Korean-Chinese gangster from Yanbian, loud, coarse, dressed like a man who has money and no taste, and the only person in the picture who loves anybody.

Why it works: the meeting is the set-piece

The structural bet Park makes is that a room full of men in suits deciding something can be more frightening than a fight, and he wins it. Goldmoon’s business is conducted in boardrooms, car parks, hotel suites and the back seats of German saloons, and Park shoots all of them with the flat, over-lit banality of actual corporate space. The violence, when it comes, arrives in these places rather than in stylised arenas — a stairwell, a lift, a corridor — and it is over quickly and cleaned up by staff. The organisation absorbs its own murders as a facilities issue.

The much-quoted lift sequence is the film’s best argument. A group of Jung Chung’s men are trapped in a car-park lift by a much larger group of Joong-gu’s, and the fight that follows is claustrophobic, badly lit and entirely without music — men hacking at each other in a metal box with nowhere to retreat. Park’s choice is to keep the camera outside the choreography’s flattery: no whip-pans, no hero framing, just bodies filling a space that is too small for them. It is horrible, and it lasts about the right amount of time, and it exists to prove a point about the size of the thing Ja-sung is inside.

The performance that carries the film is Hwang Jung-min’s, and it is one of the great gangster turns of the century. Jung Chung is written as comic relief — the vulgar outsider from Yanbian, the man in the terrible jacket who swears in two dialects — and Hwang plays him as the only person in the film with an interior life. He is funny for about forty minutes, and then you notice that the joke has been building a person: a man who is genuinely fond of Ja-sung, genuinely aware that he is being outmanoeuvred by better-dressed rivals, and genuinely capable of appalling violence when it becomes necessary. The film’s whole emotional payload rides on the audience liking him more than they meant to.

Lee Jung-jae has the more thankless job, and he does it by playing almost nothing. Ja-sung is a man who has spent eight years not reacting, and Lee gives him a face that has been trained out of expression. The performance only makes sense in retrospect — you cannot read him because he cannot afford to be read — and it is a considerable piece of discipline from an actor the industry had spent a decade casting for his looks.

Choi Min-sik, meanwhile, is doing something genuinely nasty. Kang Hee-cheol is the handler, the good guy, the state, and Choi plays him as a man who eats noodles while ruining lives. He is affable, paternal, entirely without conscience, and the film’s most quietly radical proposition is that he is worse than the gangsters, because they at least admit what they are. Casting the man from Oldboy as the establishment is its own joke.

The case against

The film has a woman problem it never addresses. Shin-woo, played by Song Ji-hyo, is another undercover officer inside Goldmoon, and she is the film’s most interesting untold story — a woman doing Ja-sung’s job with none of his protection — and she is used as a plot device. Ja-sung’s pregnant wife exists to be endangered. In a 130-minute film about loyalty and belonging, no woman gets to be loyal to anything on her own account.

The middle also sags. There is a stretch around the hour mark where Park is moving pieces — a memo, a document, a suspicion — and the mole-thriller machinery he was so keen to skip past comes back to be serviced. And the film’s cynicism about the police is total to the point of being uncontested, which drains some tension: if the state is simply another gang with paperwork, Ja-sung’s dilemma has less pull than the film thinks.

The real ancestor

Infernal Affairs is the obvious name and the wrong one. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 film is a tragedy about two men who have lost their real names — an identity thriller with a moral centre. Park has borrowed its premise and thrown away its theme.

The film New World is actually descended from is Johnnie To’s Election, made in Hong Kong in 2005, which took the triad picture and reimagined it as a committee procedure: the whole plot is a leadership vote, conducted by ageing men in restaurants, and the horror is bureaucratic. To worked out that organised crime films had been lying about their subject for fifty years — that the interesting thing about a syndicate is that it is an institution, with minutes and succession rules and a HR problem. Park has taken that insight, moved it to Seoul, and grafted it onto the chaebol, which is the most Korean thing he could possibly have done: the joke of New World is that the crime syndicate and the family conglomerate are the same object described twice.

Behind To, the grandfather is Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity cycle from 1973, which shot yakuza politics as a series of dreary alliances and betrayals with freeze-frames and captions, like a documentary about a failing firm. Every gangster film that treats the organisation as a workplace rather than an opera owes that series a debt.

If you want the same director at the opposite temperature, Night in Paradise is Park Hoon-jung seven years later, filming the same industry as a place to grieve in rather than climb. Infernal Affairs remains essential viewing for what Park chose to leave behind. A Bittersweet Life is the Korean syndicate film as pure surface, and it is a useful contrast: Kim Jee-woon’s organisation is a mood, Park’s is an employer. The wider route in is Korean genre cinema: ten to start with.

The verdict

New World is the best Korean gangster film of the 2010s and it gets there by being bored with the genre’s favourite subject. The undercover premise is a way into the building; once inside, Park Hoon-jung films the thing he actually cares about, which is how a large organisation decides who it belongs to and what that decision costs the people standing in the room. It has a great villain who is also the hero’s friend, a handler who is more frightening than any of the criminals, and a lift sequence that will stay with you longer than you want. Hwang Jung-min walks off with it in a jacket that should be evidence. Watch it before you watch any of the films that have spent a decade copying it, and watch it knowing that the phrase “the Korean Infernal Affairs” is a bad description of a better film.

Spoilers below

The reason New World is not Infernal Affairs is the ending, and the ending is a coup.

Kang never intends to let Ja-sung out. The exit has been dangled for eight years because Ja-sung is more useful inside, and when Ja-sung finally understands that the promise was never real — that his handler regards him as an asset rather than an officer, and will spend him until he is gone — the film’s moral floor drops out. Kang’s cruelty is not passion. It is procurement.

Jung Chung dies. He is ambushed and killed by Joong-gu’s people, and the film gives him a long, hopeless, badly-lit death that is the emotional high point of the picture: the one man who genuinely loved somebody, bleeding out having outlived his usefulness to the plot. Hwang Jung-min’s performance up to that moment is what makes the last half hour work, because after him there is nobody left in the film to like.

Then Ja-sung chooses. He has Kang killed, has Joong-gu removed, and takes Goldmoon for himself — and the point Park is making is that this is the only rational move on the board. He has no life outside the organisation. The police were never going to release him. The gangsters, whatever else they did, told him the truth about what he was. Operation New World succeeds exactly as designed: the police install their own man at the head of the syndicate. What Kang failed to consider is that their man had stopped being theirs some years earlier.

The final act reframes the whole film as an origin story. That flashback — Ja-sung and Jung Chung meeting years ago, Jung Chung offering him a job and a friendship on the strength of nothing — is the last thing Park shows us, and it recasts everything above the line. The undercover cop did not lose himself in the role. He was offered a family by a gangster and a contract by a policeman, and it took him eight years to work out which one had ever meant it.