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Directed by JANG Cheol-soo
Starring KIM Soo-hyun, PARK Ki-woong, LEE Hyun-woo
Release Date June 5, 2013

Ryu-hwan is a North Korean spy who has emerged from a brutal training regimen to be recognized as a highly talented, elite agent. He is dispatched to the South and ends up in a small, rundown community where he assumes the guise of the village idiot. As the days pass, he observes his fellow townspeople and waits for orders from his superiors, all the while acting in a way that makes the people around him assume that his IQ is well below 70. Privately, he worries about his mother back in the North, and waits for the day when he can return.

 

As time passes, however, two other North Korean spies end up being sent to the same community. Hae-rang, with his hair dyed orange, assumes the role of an amateur rock guitarist. The younger Hae-jin poses as a high school student. They pass the days absorbed in minor incidents of one kind or another until, with power shifts underway in the North Korean government, they receive a most unexpected and shocking order.

 

Secretly Greatly is based on a well-known webcomic by HUN, so the film’s title was already familiar to many viewers when it opened in theaters on June 5. However what stirred up the most interest among the public was the casting of white-hot actor KIM Soo-hyun in the lead role. Having become hugely popular in the MBC drama The Moon Embracing the Sun, KIM subsequently appeared in the record-breaking box office hit The Thieves opposite Gianna JUN. By the time Secretly Greatly reached theaters, anticipation was so high that the film set a new box office record for the most tickets sold on an opening day. The following day, it set another record for the most tickets sold on a single day by any Korean film.

 

Secretly Greatly is the second feature film and the first major box office hit by director JANG Cheol-soo. JANG drew wide attention in 2010 with his debut feature Bedeviled, about an abused woman on a remote island who one day exacts a grisly revenge on her tormentors. Shot on a low budget, that film was critically praised and screened in the Critics Week section of the Cannes Film Festival, but did not break out commercially. Critics have been much less enthusiastic about Secretly Greatly, but mainstream audiences are turning it into one of the highest grossing films of the year.