Disappointingly this year I was away on a work trip for a week, missing almost the entirety of the London Film Festival. The only day I could make was the very last day, the Sunday. So that morning I scrolled through the ticket list online and quickly picked two films which looked entertaining and intriguing. As with previous years, even these two films were a pretty mixed bag. But after having seen 6 films in 2016, 4 in 2017 and 2 this year, I hope this downward trend won’t continue, and I hope I’ll get more chance to see more next year (and have more time to research the films!).
The Spy Gone North (2018, Yoon Jong-bin)
Despite how most movies choose to show it, spying in real life I can imagine is very often a lonely, tense, and tedious profession – one fuelled by both the thrill of the operation and a deep-rooted paranoia that could very well take you to the brink. What I admired about this film is that it is unafraid to show this side of the spying world.
Very much taking its inspiration from John Le Carré more than James Bond, The Spy Gone North is a handsomely made thriller, one which is unafraid to take its time, to fully immerse one in the often excruciatingly drawn-out and cumbersome processes involved in political spying. The film takes inspiration from the true story of Park Suk-Young, codenamed Black Venus, an ex-military intelligence officer who is recruited by the South Korean government to infiltrate North Korea posing as a businessman, in order to learn more about their burgeoning nuclear programme. The film begins in 1993 – he has already been recruited at this point, and is beginning the long, painful process of tearing down his old life in order to appear to all as an alcoholic dropout, working to rebuild his life as an ambitious salesman. We learn next to nothing of his personal life – his life over many years is dedicated exclusively to the mission. Even talk of a family back home reveals nothing; we never meet relatives, and he never expresses any desire to give up the mission.
Indeed, the first hour of the film shows in minute exacting detail the steps he and the South Korean government take to establish his backstory – creating a naïve bumbling but ambitious character willing to do anything to make money. He starts small, forging deals with low-level merchants, but with some complicated string-pulling by the government which involves creating an international dispute over the import of nuts, Black Venus begins to make a name for himself. It is quite a dry film, but it is never dull. Despite the length, director Yoon Jong-bin and the vast script creates a sense of pace and scale which builds a surprising degree of tension and builds big stakes. You can’t help but marvel at Black Venus’ skill and dedication, and the lengths he begins to reach within North Korea are truly dazzling to behold. That the film can continue to ground these leaps within a sense of reality (a trip to Pyongyang is magnificently filmed) is to its credit.
Reading the reviews, I think I personally found this film more engaging than some. It can be a little hard to keep up at times, and a little background knowledge in Korean politics, particularly South Korean elections, would have proven helpful. Once Black Venus becomes so deeply embedded, you begin to lose track of what his mission actually entails. But the construction of the script and the steady direction maintains that degree of tension and intrigue that keeps you sucked in.
The Prey (2018, Jimmy Henderson)
Looking back now, I really wish my second choice had been something other than this film. I’d gone in hoping for some deliciously pulpy thrills – watching the beautifully crafted exploitation shoot-em-up Let the Corpses Tan last festival gave me hope that I could find something similar this time. And well, The Prey wasn’t bad. Just painfully average and even dull at times, despite its slight running time.
The premise sounded juicy enough – a Chinese undercover cop investigating illegal gambling rings in Bangkok is arrested and thrown into a jail deep in the jungle run by a rogue warden (Vithaya Pansringarm, best known for playing the karaoke-loving vigilante detective in Only God Forgives) who offers wealthy visitors the chance to hunt his prisoners for sport in the surrounding wilderness. A gleefully basic and trashy story, cheap thrills, some martial arts and gunfighting action – what more could you need from a film like this?
It’s obvious that The Prey is made by someone with a deep love and understanding of the genre. The setup is ambitious, the fight scenes are wisely filmed generally in medium close-ups with not too much editing, the plot is thin. But frankly there’s nothing here that felt at all original or compellingly new. The lead character is sketched so thin it’s virtually impossible to care what happens to him. Honestly none of the characters are remotely engaging, even with the cheap tactic of throwing an innocent man and his mute child into the messy mix. None of the action scenes are easy to recall once the film has ended, which is probably the greatest crime this film commits.
The Prey surely has ambitions of meeting the quality of something like The Raid, but the sheer relentlessness and the awe-inspiring stuntwork of that film can’t help but outclass The Prey in every way. Throw in a completely boneheaded and unnecessary depiction of mental illness and you’ve got a film which disappoints from being simply uninspiring.
Musings from a Darkened Room 