The Korean thriller The Old Woman With the Knife opens at AMC Grapevine Mills this weekend. That evocative title will sound familiar to those of you who are familiar with Korean literature. It’s based on a novel by Gu Byeong-mo, a best-selling author of YA fiction in South Korea who uses horror and fantasy to comment on social issues. Some of her novels even use magic as a plot device, which is not common in Korean YA lit. I didn’t get a chance to read the novel, and it’s been translated into English, so I can’t use my lack of fluency with Korean as an excuse. (It’s also been turned into a stage musical that premiered last year, and what must that be like?) What I can say is that this non-magical action film is a fine genre piece with a few issues.
The story begins in 1975, with a homeless girl (Shin Si-ah) being taken in by a family that owns a restaurant. When she kills an American soldier who tries to rape her, the family puts her to work at their other business, taking on contracts to kill “cockroaches,” who include predatory lenders, perverts on the subway, and nurses who beat their elderly patients. Our girl takes the name “Hornclaw” as her nom de combat, and in the present day she’s a gray-haired woman (Lee Hye-young) who’s still working for her deceased employers’ disabled son (Kim Mu-yeol).
Even though the agency has expanded to employ several killers, the movie still gives us a sense that things are falling apart. The offices are dingy, and the agency refuses to touch drug dealers, because they’re too powerful. Hornclaw has to hide the trembling that affects her hands at times, and she has to take out her most experienced colleague (Choi Moo-sung) after he botches a hit. Most worrying of all is when her agency hires a psychopathic new recruit codenamed Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol). When they send him out to kill a man and bring back his ring, he triumphantly returns with all 10 of the victim’s fingers, neatly severed at the knuckle and wrapped in a gift box.
Director/co-writer Min Kyu-dong has had a varied career that has encompassed lesbian horror (Memento Mori) and romantic comedy (All About My Wife). He does well with the action sequences, some of which are flashbacks with Shin carrying out Hornclaw’s past glories. Unfortunately, those flashbacks wind up getting in the way, as their explanation of Bullfight’s history with Hornclaw get in the way of their climactic showdown at an abandoned amusement park. Her emotional connection with a recently widowed veterinarian (Yeon Woo-jin) is a tiresome plot contrivance that’s not enough to hang the movie on. Likely all this worked better in print.
Then again, the film still has fairly obvious hints of what made Gu’s novel find its audience, with its ruminations on aging and having no family to depend on. (Supporting elderly parents is standard practice for working-age South Koreans.) Lee is a year younger than Tom Cruise and does much of her stunts. The Old Woman With the Knife bears more than a passing resemblance to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (stay tuned for that review next week), but its reckoning with its antihero’s life of bad deeds done for good reasons is deeper and accomplished with less fuss. That’s enough to make me want more film versions of Gu’s books.
The Old Woman With the Knife
Starring Lee Hye-young and Kim Sung-cheol. Directed by Min Kyu-dong. Written by Min Kyu-dong and Kim Dong-wan, based on Gu Byeong-mo’s novel. Not rated.
