2010｜116 MIN | Drama, Action

DIRECTOR JANG Hun

CAST SONG Kang-ho, GANG Dong-won, JEON Guk-hwan, PARK Hyuk-kwon

RELEASE DATE February 4, 2010

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The North Korean spy action-drama has been a popular genre in Korean cinema for many years, notably breaking out through KANG Je-kyu’s Swiri (1999), Korea’s first genuine blockbuster, and remaining consistently popular all the way to the current box office hit The Spy Gone North from YOON Jong-bin. There’s been quite a bit of evolution within the genre in that time and one of the big turning points came during the Lunar New Year holiday of 2010 when SONG Kang-ho and GANG Dong-won paired up for the hit Secret Reunion (2010). The requisite guns and double crosses were evident in abundance, but for the first time, a North Korean spy was humanized and allowed to build a positive relationship with an opposing member of the South Korean intelligence of enforcement community.

Ji-won, a North Korean spy working undercover in the South, joins a comrade and a senior assassin on a mission to eliminate a treacherous defector. Meanwhile, South Korean agent Han-gyu catches wind of their plan. What was supposed to be a simple hit becomes a botched bloodbath which ends up with Ji-won losing his chance to return home to his wife and child and Han-gyu losing his job. Six years later, Han-gyu runs a service to recuperate runaway Southeast Asian brides and by chance runs into Ji-won working at a construction site. Sensing an opportunity, he offers him a job.

Graduating to blockbuster fare after his breakout mid-budget gangster debut Rough Cut (2008), which was produced and written by KIM Ki-duk, Director JANG Hun found even greater success with Secret Reunion. While it begins and ends with significant action sequences, the film is far less concerned with the usual espionage set pieces for most of its running time, relying more on clearly drawn character drama and the effective synergy between its two leads.

Secret Reunion may not be the first South Korean film to feature sympathetic North Korean character, but it furthered the blueprint set forth by PARK Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area /JSA (2000), also featuring SONG, by reserving the bulk of its narrative to building a rapport between the opposing geopolitical forces. The model has continued with recent hits such as Confidential Assignment (2017) and Steel Rain (2017), not to mention The Spy Gone North, surely the most complex example to emerge thus far.

As ever, SONG proves an excellent lead as the relatable, bumbling and frequently exasperating Han-gyu while GANG relies on his quiet charisma playing the cool, effective and humanistic Ji-won. SONG and director JANG would go on to even greater commercial peaks in last year’s political drama A Taxi Driver (2017), which became the fifteenth Korean film to drive past the ten million viewer mark.