Squid Game star goes sleek in the breathless South Korean spy thriller Hunt, at VIFF to December 8

Directing and acting, Lee Jung-jae builds over-the-top car chases, shootouts, and espionage intrigue

By Janet Smith

Lee Jung-jae and Jung Woo-sung play two rivals trying to root out a mole in the KCIA.

VIFF Centre presents Hunt to December 8

KOREAN STAR LEE JUNG-JAE makes a dramatic departure from his goofy Squid Game persona in Hunt—also taking the director’s chair in this over-the-top-frenetic political action thriller.

Car chases and shootouts meet the sinister intrigue of South Korea’s early-1980s rule under a brutal autocracy. Think Mission Impossible by way of Internal Affairs and anything by Le Carré, underlaid with the complex, decades-old tensions between North and South Korea. It’s an ambitious, convoluted mix that ultimately spirals out of control. Still, you have to admire the breathless pace of a film whose audacious action hearkens back to the early-90s Hong Kong heyday of Hard Boiled.

In the wake of an assassination attempt against South Korea’s president—on U.S. soil, no less—the country’s intelligence agency, the KCIA, realizes there’s a mole in its midst. That sets up a vicious rivalry between Foreign Unit chief Park Pyong-ho (Lee) and Domestic Unit chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung), both assigned to root out the double agent—and both wonderfully sleek, enigmatic, and sharklike, with their dark, perfectly tailored suits, slicked-back hair, and impermeable perma-frowns.

Some of the plot turns will lose Western viewers—you may want to brush up on your late-70s, early-80s Korean history—and there’s a disturbing ambivalence about all the brutal torture scenes here. (It’s weirdly unclear how the filmmaker feels about the casual use of state-sponsored violence in interrogations.) But if you take it in like a B-action thrill ride, there are some great twists and red herrings, trips to Tokyo and Bangkok, and manically inspired editing in the action scenes. It’s a wild ride, though you may wonder where you’ve just been afterward. 

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