Summary
A slickly produced snapshot of a moment in time that remains divisive to this day. An excellent cast and beautiful photography lift this above the average bear.
South Korea’s cinema has been looking increasingly inward in the last few years. Perhaps it’s because Korean cinema recently marked a century of moviemaking, but its national output has seen several high-profile thrillers tackling historic moments in politics.
Joining the ranks of A Taxi Driver, The Spy Gone North and 1987: When the Day Comes, director Woo Min-ho’s THE MAN STANDING NEXT (남산의 부장들) is the latest period political piece to tackle a controversial subject.
Indeed, the presidency of Park Chung-hee (played here by Lee Sung-min) remains divisive to this day. In the back half of his presidency, he amended the constitution to be highly authoritarian, and took complete control of the media and military. Yet he’s still praised for his economic growth, and his eldest daughter became president of South Korea in 2013.
The film takes place in the 40 days leading up to his assassination, it follows the non-fiction book The Chiefs of Namsam (the film’s Korean title) in renaming some of the players. Exiled former KCIA director Park Yong-gak (Kwak Do-won as a character based on Kim Hyong-uk) is setting off sparks in the US known as Koreagate. Current KCIA director Kim Gyu-pyeong (Lee Byung-hun), a character inspired by real-life assassin Kim Jae-gyu, is caught in the middle as escalations mount.
Early in the piece, a comparison is made with Iago and Othello. While the real-life Kim is well-known as Park’s assassin, and was executed in 1980 for the crime against the state, here he’s cast in one of Shakespeare’s most overtly Machiavellian plots. Lee Byung-hun, last seen in the blockbuster Ashfall, shows amazing restraint as a spring-coil waiting to strike in this superb performance.
Following this model, it’s a tightly controlled piece, building from the minor political crises of the opening, through to shadowy rendezvous and some thrilling action to boot. The bloody finale, built around a tense dinner table sequence in which Kim issues a final bargaining plea to Park, is a masterpiece of action brutality.
Cinematographer Ko Nak-Sun, who served up some period realness in A Taxi Driver, delivers one of the most beautifully shot Korean films in recent memory. The expansion of the backgrounds to encompass US and European locations helps with the scope, but it’s the way Ko shoots nights, close-up faces, overheard symmetry and nighttime murkiness.
International audiences will no doubt have a very different take on this, given that the living memory of the Park Presidency is not as immediate for them, it remains a tense and superior political thriller that packs a powerful punch.
2020 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Woo Min-Ho | WRITER: Lee Ji-Min, Woo Min-Ho | CAST: Lee Byung-Hun, Lee Sung-Min, Kwak Do-Won | DISTRIBUTOR: Showbox | RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 22 January 2020 (South Korea), 26 May 2020 (US Blu-ray)
