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South Korean culture has had a long history of speaking truth to power. The famed pansori folktale Chunhyangga, after all, is the tale of Chunhyang resisting the advances of a corrupt governor as she awaits the return of her husband. Most accessible to international audiences via Im Kwon-taek's Chunhyang (2000), there's an even greater human impulse than the love story at play. Namely, the question of just, what to do in the face of unjust power?

The exact political motivations behind the machinations are typically obscured, as might be expected. While Shin Sang-ok's A College Woman's Confession (1958) does indeed feature a corrupt politician, his crime was simply having a child out of wedlock and is not shown, on the personal level, as being a bad guy. Nevertheless, A College Woman's Confession at large is an indictment of South Korean patriarchy. Such are the contradictions of politics in the context of legitimate political systems. Even Chunhyang, ultimately, must rely on virtuous public officials to protect her from the bad ones.

The modern era of the South Korean political thriller has taken on a much more cynical bite than that, even as its politically aligned characters remain nonpartisan. Park In-je's The Mayor (2017), starring the legendary Choi Min-sik in the title role, is an unflinching, unsympathetic look at the campaign trail devoid of any form of sentimentalism. The mayor resorts to dirty tricks to hold onto power, some of them of a distinctly patriarchal tone. But the film lacks a credible opponent. Though the mayor is constantly at risk of collapsing under his own weight, there's little sense that his opposition is all that competent, leaving voters to a grim choice.

In one sense this overarching feeling of pessimism is the main difference between a political thriller and just, say, a political comedy. Long Live the King (2019) isn't that different from The Mayor on the surface level, being as it is about an obviously corrupt political election. Yet there are no thrills because there's no sense of visceral danger. As with other genre thrillers, South Korean political thrillers are as likely as not to end with its heroes and anti-heroes dead, or at least heavily mutilated from having run afoul of gangsters.

One of the great ironies of South Korean political thrillers is that they tend to be underrepresented mainly because the gangster thriller often does everything the political thriller is trying to do even better. There's more violence, and even more politics than you might generally expect in the typical South Korean gangster flick. Yoo Ha's Gangnam Blues (2015), while perhaps better categorized as a noir film than a gangster thriller, due to its introspective approach to the lead character played by Lee Min-ho, delves quite a bit into politics simply because the conflict centers around the development of the Gangnam district of Seoul in the eighties. This was a highly political process, even if gangsters were doing much of the dirty work.

South Korean political thrillers are also disproportionately likely to take place in the past, and part of this is once again just a matter of expediency. There aren't very many people to offend in regard to long ago events in South Korean history. Kingmaker (2022) is a bit of a surprise for the political thriller, though, in that it depicts the 1970 presidential election not that differently from how one might expect to see in a modern presidential election. Though South Korea is commonly described as a dictatorship before 1987, the country nevertheless did have a competitive political system, with important maneuverings both behind and in front of the scenes.

The very next year, 12.12: The Day (2023) escalated that portrayal with its depiction of the events leading to the 1979 coup. Hwang Jung-min, in his role as Commander Chun, is depicted as almost crabbily and impulsively deciding to take over the government in the wake of a power vacuum because the transient civilian leadership doesn't treat him with sufficient respect. 12.12: The Day is an excellent example of how ideology and politics don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. What Commander Chun actually wants to do is less important than the fact that he has well-placed allies throughout the government to help him do it.

12.12: The Day has especially unfortunate relevance today, as it was followed up almost a year to the day with an actual coup attempt by the real world president Yoon Suk-yeol, who may or may not have found the film to be an inspiration. On January 19th, Yoon's supporters even attacked the Seoul Western District Court. This attack has been widely compared to the January 6th insurrection in the United States, in terms of its petty vandalism seeking to accomplish...something.

We shouldn't go so far as to blame the movie for what happened, of course. But then, the epic scope of the better known South Korean political thrillers tends to bely the often petty nature of such public corruption in practice. B Cut (2023) is not as highbrow a film as the others I've mentioned here. It's a crime thriller originating from cell phone data recovery. How politicians enter into it is, that one of them has been abusing his wife. Our intrepid hero, played by Kim Dong-wan, seeks to expose the truth.

B Cut has had quite a bit of overseas exposure simply because its lead actor is a part of Shinhwa. While not an obvious fit for Kim Dong-wan's brand, B Cut's international popularity speaks to how easy it is for people worldwide to identify with even the crudest stories about unaccountable public figures. After all, this is ultimately what B Cut has in common with more traditional stories such as Chunhyang. There's the primal fear of their being no such thing as justice. Where once public officials had to save the day, B Cut can really on the fourth estate of journalism.

But lest I give too much of an optimistic impression of the South Korean press, Inside Men (2015) is a brutal depiction of the political wheeling and dealing that's conducted even by the newspapers. It's a political thriller that definitely falls a lot closer to the gangster thriller side of the spectrum. This is just because of how physically brutal it can get, despite being a commentary on the cynicism of South Korean politics in the 2010s much as The Mayor was.

And to be clear, all of this cynicism was a direct consequence of ongoing current events. Seven Years-Journalism Without Journalist (2017) is a documentary dealing with press censorship in the Lee Myung-bak years. The Plan (2017) discussed the conspiracy theory that the 2012 Presidential Election was rigged. The Reservoir Game (2017) dealt with money laundering in this era. Even when it took a moment for these documentaries to actually come out, reporting on the topics were a pervasive influence on South Korea's film culture.

None of this context is necessary to understand and appreciate these films. But the exact details of the stories certainly adds a lot to appreciating them. As political corruption seems to remain a human constant, so too, will the political thriller likely to continue to evolve beyond these various forms.

Written by William Schwartz
Edited by kofic