The Villainess: The Kinetic Korean Assassin Film

There is a category of film that is a delivery mechanism for about twenty-five minutes of astonishing physical craft, and the remaining ninety minutes are the tax you pay. The Villainess, which Jung Byung-gil brought to the Midnight Screenings strand at Cannes in 2017 and which sent that room out into the night making noises, is the purest specimen the 2010s produced. Its action is among the best of the decade. Its story is a bag of flashbacks that someone has shaken. Both of these things are true at once and the film has never much cared that they sit badly together.

What makes it worth a revisit eight years on is not the ovation. It is that the film keeps being cited — by people making action films, by people writing about how action films are shot — for a specific technical argument it makes in its first reel, and that argument has aged better than almost anything else in the picture.

Eight minutes before you see her face

The film opens with a door. The camera goes through it, and for the next several minutes the camera is a person: it punches, it shoots, it reloads, it gets hit, it falls down stairs, it moves through a building full of men who are trying to kill it. Hands enter frame from below, the way your own hands do. There is no cutaway to establish who we are or why we are here. The killing is continuous, exhausting, and staged in what appears to be a very small number of takes, and by the time the sequence has torn through several floors you have stopped asking questions about plot and started asking questions about how.

The sequence ends at a mirror, and the mirror is the punchline. The person doing all this is Sook-hee, played by Kim Ok-vin, and the reveal is the film handing the camera back and saying: right, now we do the film.

The film it then does goes roughly like this. Sook-hee is taken in by a South Korean intelligence outfit that runs a training academy for female assassins, presided over by a handler, Kwon-sook, played by Kim Seo-hyung with the manner of a headmistress at a school for people who will not be attending the reunion. The deal is ten years of contract killing in exchange for a life afterwards. Sook-hee is given surgery, a new face, and a cover identity as an actress — a joke the film makes and then declines to develop. She is placed in a flat, watched by a neighbour called Hyun-soo, played by Sung Joon, whose interest in her is not the neighbourly kind. And threaded through all of it, in a flashback structure that starts complicated and does not simplify, is Joong-sang, played by Shin Ha-kyun: the man who trained her, married her, and is the reason she went through that door in the first place.

Why it works: the camera is a participant

Jung Byung-gil was a stuntman before he was a director, and in 2008 he made a documentary called Action Boys about the Korean stunt industry — specifically about what it does to the bodies of the young men who go into it. This is the single most useful fact about The Villainess, and it explains the film’s whole method. Jung does not shoot action the way a director covers action. He shoots it the way a stunt performer experiences it: from inside, at the wrong height, with the impacts landing on the lens.

The consequences are everywhere. The much-quoted motorcycle sequence has two people fighting with blades while riding at speed, and Jung’s camera is not tracking alongside them at a respectful distance; it is in the lane, at axle height, swinging up into the fight and back out. The bus sequence puts the violence into a space with a hard ceiling and no room to swing, so the choreography has to become ugly and cramped and short-armed, which is exactly what a real fight in a bus would be. Sook-hee takes a lot of the damage and Jung stays on the receiving end of it, which is the honest and unusual choice — most action cinema aligns the camera with the person winning.

The technique has a cost and Jung pays it knowingly: you frequently cannot tell what is happening. Geography goes. Legibility goes. A Hong Kong master would have given you the clean wide, the reaction, the impact, and let you admire the work. Jung trades that admiration for sensation, and the whole aesthetic argument of the film is that the trade is worth making — that being disoriented and battered is closer to the experience of violence than being impressed by it is. I think he is right about a third of the time and wrong the rest, and I would rather watch a director be wrong about something that interesting than be safely competent.

The other thing the film gets right is that Kim Ok-vin can act through the noise. She has to play grief, rage, maternity and a training montage while wearing prosthetics and being thrown down a stairwell, and the performance holds in all of those registers. When the film pauses — and it does, more than its reputation suggests — she is playing exhaustion rather than cool, which is a much harder note and the reason the character survives the plot.

The plot is the problem

Let us be honest about the tax. The Villainess has three timelines and no clear reason for the interleaving beyond a desire to withhold. Information that would make the present tense legible is deferred into flashbacks that arrive too late to help, and the film’s back half turns into melodrama — a marriage, a child, a betrayal, a long-lost figure — delivered with a sincerity the action scenes never ask for. The tonal seam is visible. The academy premise, which promises satire, gets used for one wedding-dress joke and then abandoned. The actress cover, which promises a genuinely clever idea about performance and identity, is essentially never cashed.

And the POV conceit is dropped. After that opening, the film returns to first person exactly once in any sustained way, which turns the most radical thing in the picture into a prologue. There is a version of The Villainess that commits, and it would either be a masterpiece or unwatchable; the version we have hedges. Hardcore Henry, released a year earlier, committed, and demonstrated exactly why hedging was the commercially sane call.

The real ancestor

The plot skeleton is Nikita, and nobody involved has ever pretended otherwise: Besson’s 1990 film established the entire grammar — the woman pulled out of a massacre, the state that owns her, the training, the new face, the domestic life that is also a leash, the tenderness weaponised. The Villainess follows it closely enough that the interesting question is temperature. Besson’s film is chilly and ironic about the state. Jung’s is hot and sentimental about the mother.

The ancestor of the camera, though, is much older and much stranger, and this is the connection worth taking away. In 1947 Robert Montgomery directed and starred in Lady in the Lake, an MGM Philip Marlowe picture shot almost entirely in the first person: the camera is Marlowe, characters address the lens, and Montgomery appears only in mirrors. It was received as a stunt, it largely failed as a film, and it has been the cautionary tale about subjective camera for eighty years. Every first-person set-piece since — Jung’s included — is a footnote to Montgomery’s experiment, and The Villainess is arguably the most persuasive rebuttal anyone has filed: the technique fails across a feature and works magnificently across eight minutes. Montgomery proved the ceiling. Jung found the room under it.

Within Korean cinema, the obvious cousin is Oldboy, whose corridor fight established the local house rule that action should look like labour rather than dance — Sook-hee inherits Oh Dae-su’s exhaustion. The Man from Nowhere is the other side of the same coin, a Korean film built on a Besson chassis that solves its tonal problem by simplifying rather than complicating. And I Saw the Devil shares this film’s conviction that revenge should cost the avenger their body. For the wider map, see Korean genre cinema: ten to start with.

The verdict

The Villainess is a film with a broken back and a magnificent engine, and eight years on the engine is what people still drive out to see. Jung Byung-gil made an action picture out of a stuntman’s proprioception — the impacts, the disorientation, the sense of the floor arriving — and in doing so he made a case about what the camera is for that directors are still arguing with. The story around it is a knot, the melodrama is laid on with a shovel, and none of that stops the motorcycle sequence from being one of the few pieces of 2010s action choreography that could not have been made in any other decade or by anyone else. Watch it for the first reel, stay for Kim Ok-vin, and forgive the middle the way you would forgive a brilliant drummer for the lyrics.

Spoilers below

The knot, untied, is this. Sook-hee’s opening rampage is revenge for the murder of Joong-sang, the crime-boss husband who trained her from childhood after her father was killed. Everything in the first reel is grief.

Except Joong-sang is alive. He engineered his own death, and he was the one who killed her father in the first place — the man who took the orphan in, raised her, made her into a weapon and married her was the author of the loss that made her available for all of it. The marriage was recruitment. The rescue was the crime. The film’s structure, which reads as coyness on a first viewing, is actually doing a job: the flashbacks are Sook-hee’s version of her own life, and the reason they keep getting revised is that she was never given the true one.

Hyun-soo, the neighbour, is an agent assigned to watch her, and his affection curdles into something real, which the agency then uses. His proposal is a mission. When he dies — and he does, on the wedding-day set-piece the film has been building towards — Sook-hee loses the only person who chose her rather than acquired her.

The last act is the film’s cleanest stretch of storytelling precisely because the plot has finally run out. Sook-hee gets to Joong-sang on a bus, in the fight that everyone remembers, and the reason it plays as catharsis rather than choreography is that she is no longer fighting for an idea. Her daughter, Eun-hye — Joong-sang’s child, the last piece of leverage the agency and the husband both held — is what the whole knot was tied around, and Joong-sang uses her as a shield in the final sequence. The film ends with Sook-hee having killed the man who invented her, and with the agency’s ten-year contract still, in every practical sense, unbroken. There is no exit. She is a weapon that has finished the only task it ever chose for itself, which leaves nothing but the tasks other people choose. Jung closes on her laughing, and it is the least funny thing in the film.