Directors in Focus: Yoon Jong-bin | Narco-Saints (2022) Review

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

Notable Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Hwang Jung-min, Park Hae-soo, Jo Woo-jin, Yoo Yeon-seok, Chang Chen, Choo Ja-hyun, Kim Min-gwi, Hyun Bong-sik, Lee Beong-ryeon

Episodes: 6

Coming to the end of my journey with director Yoon Jong-bin, I took a journey with his most recent project, his first foray into television, with the Netflix original limited series, Narco-Saints, based on true events about a man who happens upon a fish-selling scheme that he falls victim to, which ends up being a "laced" situation. Unaware of what was in the fish he had traveled from South Korea to Suriname to gather and sell for profit, Kang In-gu (Ha Jung-woo) finds himself working for the NIS when it is brought to his attention that a powerful drug lord, a local pastor named Jeon (Hwang Jung-min), screwed over his life. Hellbent on getting revenge and a boatload of promised cash in the process, In-gu agrees to help the agent that approaches him, and thus a journey of drugs, bloodshed, and a little worship for good measure ensues.

Directors in Focus: Yoon Jong-bin | The Spy Gone North (2018) Review

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-bin, Lee Sung-min, Cho Jin-woong, Ju Ji-hoon, Jung So-ri, Kim Hong-pa, Gi Ju-bong

Set in the year 1993, a man named Heuk Geum-seong is sort of pulled against his will into becoming a spy for South Korea. He goes by the codename Black Venus and is posing as a businessman selling Chinese products in Beijing, snowballing into linking up with the North Korean government in hopes of acquiring intel on North Korea, Kim Jong-il, and digging into the state of their nuclear weapons and seeing just how powerful the hidden country may be. This is based on a true story, and of course, with any film of this nature, there will always be details altered for dramatization purposes, but with this end result in the form of The Spy Gone North, what we have is a powerfully told story of espionage that doesn't find itself stuck in the genre trapping of most spy films. There are no guns fired and no real action set pieces. Instead, the intensity, which is almost unbearable at times, comes from the real-life threat of the situation, which unfortunately remains true to this day, and the looming threat of war breaking out at any moment. This is right up there with the very best work from Yoon.

Deliver Us from Evil (2021)

Director: Hong Won-chan

Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Lee Jung-jae, Park Jung-min, Choi Hee-seo, Park So-yi, Song Young-chang

 

One time I had a friend of mine refer to action films that revolve around kidnapping as ‘search and destroy films,’ and it has been a phrase I tend to use for some time now. To be honest, I’m quite a fan of these search and destroy flicks, whether it’s a Taken knock-off or one of the SPL sequels. For the film Deliver Us from Evil, a title that sounds far more fitting for a religious horror film than an intense and brutal South Korean actioner, it’s the latter films that have the most influence on its intentions. At the baseline, it’s a fairly standard action thriller that even more casual fans of the genre or South Korean cinema can consume. With two key performances, some brutal action, and just enough heart, it’s hard not to love what Deliver Us from Evil is pushing despite its relatively generic approach to storytelling. 

 

Master and Asura: The City of Madness (2016/2017)

MASTER (2017)

Director: Cho Ui-seok

Notable Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Kang Dong-won, Kim Woo-bin, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-su, Jin Kyung

At this point, the South Korean market is so good at making thrillers that it’s setting the bar too high for them to even keep up. Master is the victim of that bar standard. If this film was made in Hollywood, it was easily be one of the best that Hollywood has made this year if not in the last handful of years and yet, compared to the two kinds of thrillers that South Korea is producing, it feels occasionally disjointed and safe.

Master tries to be a complex socio-political-economic thriller as it takes two heroes and pits them against a financial criminal mastermind, played with impressive swagger by Lee Byung-hun, who is running a massive pyramid scheme. This is problematic, outside of being ambitious, because it’s very dense material. A plethora of various characters, two leads, and enough plot to make two movies. Two movies that are jammed into one. The first hour is purely set up, but it’s built like its own film and reaches a natural climax and everything. The second half then jumps ahead six months (or more, as memory seems to escape me at this moment) and proceeds to build an entirely new plot where our leads must re-team up to find the baddie AGAIN and hunt him down. It’s a ballsy maneuver for the film, but it’s a lot to consume for a two and half hour piece of cinema. Respect, for sure, but also not perhaps the most efficient maneuver when both pieces could have been fantastic films on their own. On top of that, the film is neither the dark and ambitious thriller nor the overly entertaining and hammy ones that South Korea is known for producing. It tries to be both and in that effort, does go far enough in either direction. For many fans, this riding the line will be wonderful for consumption, but ultimately for this reviewer it felt like they didn’t want to make a choice one way or the other and it’s a tad disappointing.

Wailing, The (2016)

Director: Na Hong-jin

Notable Cast: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Jun Kunimura, Chun Woo-hee, Jo Han-chul, Jang So-yeon

At this point, I feel like Na Hong-jin is just fuckin’ with us. There is no way that a director takes his first three feature length films and drops three instant classics. Not just cult classics, but true cinematic classics that rise above their assigned genres and edgy non-mainstream elements. His latest film, the horror thriller The Wailing, is just one more film to add to his already impressive cinematic streak of glory. While The Chaser and The Yellow Sea both redefined the thriller into modern effective tales of woe and shock, The Wailing defines what a modern horror film should look like while retaining the same effective style and writing that made his previous two outings so bold and real. This film will knock the wind out of you. It’s a film that defines the best of what horror has to offer by building a real world with characters you care for…and then utterly destroying it all in front of you. The Wailing is the kind of outsider cinema that every film maker should want to make - thoughtful, shocking, thrilling, and ultimately devastating.