On all moles – Kommersant

The thriller The Hunt is the directorial debut of South Korean actor Lee Jong Jae, who has a solid filmography but is best known to international viewers from the Netflix hit series The Squid Game. He also filmed himself in one of the main roles in this film about the next round of confrontation between the two Korean states. Julia Shagelman not without difficulty was given the distinction of many shades of gray in the intricate plot plexus.

The opening credit, as usual, warns that the events of the film are completely fictional, and any coincidence of the characters with real people is accidental and unintentional. The authors (the script was written by director Lee Jong Jae himself, along with another debutant in the feature film, Cho Seung-hee), however, are somewhat cunning: the backdrop for the main espionage intrigue in their film is the real twists and turns of South Korean history, and closer to the finale, the characters are already taking in them direct participation. Despite the fact that the film premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, although out of competition, it is clearly more focused on its domestic audience. To understand what is happening, it would be good to have at least a general idea of ​​​​the military coup on December 12, 1979, which was carried out by the future president Chun Doo-hwan (never named in the film by name), the brutal suppression of protests against the emerging dictatorship in the city of Gwangju, and the attempted assassination of a South Korean leader in Rangoon on October 9, 1983 – the latter, if you don’t know anything about it, can really seem like the fruit of the scriptwriters’ wild imagination. Those to whom these names, dates and toponyms do not mean anything will have to be content with scraps of information in the dialogues and the realization that at this point in history, as usual, everything was far from unambiguous.

The film begins with a fictional attempt on the life of the President of South Korea (Song Seong-ho), who recently came to power with the help of a coup and intends to change the constitution in order to usurp this power completely. It takes place in Washington to the noise of protests from the Korean diaspora. “We ran away, so there’s nothing to speak out now,” the director of the intelligence department (Song Yong Chang) snorts disapprovingly, dissatisfied with the fact that it is impossible to disperse the demonstrators here, like at home in Seoul. The head of state is rescued, but domestic intelligence chief Kim Jong-do (Jung Woo-sung) kills a sniper who has taken his foreign intelligence colleague Park Byung-ho (Lee Jong-jae) hostage before information about his clients can be extracted from him. Having arranged a scolding for both, the director reports that a North Korean “mole” named Donlim has wound up in their ranks and all efforts should be directed to his capture.

This, however, is followed by new failures: Park in Tokyo loses an important defector from North Korea, who is ready to transfer nuclear secrets to the South in exchange for shelter, and for Kim, the disruption of another operation leads to the death of eight employees. Mutual suspicions grow, and the director, caught in corruption, is replaced by a protege of the president himself (Kim Jong-soo), who is already deliberately pitting the two bosses and their subordinates against each other, ordering cross-checks. The methods of both departments are the same: beatings and torture, so it becomes more and more difficult to understand who are the good guys here and who are not. Donlim, meanwhile, feels so at ease in this troubled water that, together with his own network of agents, he is preparing a new assassination attempt on the president.

The main characters, despite their high ranks, are not afraid to work “on the ground” and get their hands dirty: they personally participate in all operations, run, shoot, and now and then beat someone in the face (for example, Pak, a corrupt director, his direct boss ). Skirmishes, chases and fights Lee John Jae shoots with pulsating explosive energy and artless cruelty. When the action slows down and the confrontation of the characters turns into a psychological plane, the film begins to resemble the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s, in which everyone suspected everyone, but it was impossible to trust anyone. True, the source of inspiration can be found closer – both in time and in geography: “The Hunt” repeatedly brings to mind the Hong Kong “Infernal Affairs” (2002), where “moles” were searched for in the mafia and the police. Lee Jong Jae’s film, however, lacks finesse in plotting. The narrative becomes more and more chaotic, multiple threads become tangled, and people in gray suits with stoic faces become decidedly indistinguishable from each other. The attempt to humanize Kim and Pak is also not entirely successful: each of them has a personal life outside the intelligence agency, but it is sketched out so schematically that it adds almost nothing to their characters, and heightened patriotism remains the main feature of both heroes. Of course, each of them understands it in his own way, but the ending, to which the service for the good of the motherland leads, turns out to be devastating for both.