A Korean Thriller Built From What the Investigation Left Out
Variety calls Hur Jin-ho's The Assassin(s) a clockwork political saga, one that turns the holes in a public investigation into an imaginative mystery in the manner of Oliver Stone's JFK. The subject is the attempted assassination of South Korean prime minister Park Chung-hee in 1974.
The comparison is really a claim about method. JFK is shorthand for a particular way of putting history on film — treating the gaps in the official account as the most dramatic material available — and the same approach applied to a South Korean case means the story is assembled from what the record could not settle.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The interesting material in a case like this isn't the official finding; it's everything the finding couldn't account for, which is why the film can build a plot out of absences.
That is also the method's risk: a story fitted neatly to the gaps can start to feel like the conclusion the record never reached.