KB News Desk
Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho dig into the 1974 killing of Yuk Young-soo in Hur Jin-ho’s Chuseok-bound thriller
South Korea’s modern history has seen no shortage of coups, conspiracies, assassinations and acts of terrorism playing out within the global tensions of the Cold War. Even so, having the first lady shot dead on live television is quite something.
It happened on Aug. 15, 1974, at a Liberation Day ceremony in Seoul when Moon Se-gwang, a 22-year-old Korean resident of Japan, charged the stage firing at strongman President Park Chung-hee mid-speech. The president managed to take cover, but his wife, Yuk Young-soo, was fatally struck.
The shooter was hanged within four months after investigators concluded he had acted on North Korean orders — though the extent of those ties is still debated a half-century later, if they existed at all.
Now the case is getting its first big-screen treatment. “The Assassin(s)” follows three men chasing the questions the investigation left behind, and it arrives with plenty of firepower: veteran director Hur Jin-ho, a marquee cast in Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho, and a Chuseok release following a gala premiere at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“It’s a tragic event, and some of the people involved are still alive, so I agonized over how to approach it,” Hur said Monday at a press conference at CGV Yongsan in Seoul.
Hur is hardly the obvious pick for the material. The veteran made his name on delicate, small-scale romances; his 1998 debut “Christmas in August” remains the genre’s touchstone in Korea. The idea for this one, he said, goes back a decade.
Turning such a politically charged event into two hours of entertainment is a thorny task, and the director said he tried to play it straight. “Because it’s based on a real case, I focused on balancing the perspectives on it,” he said. “Going through the records and interviews, I worked not to let myself lean one way or the other.”
The cast adds plenty of star wattage to the weighty material. Yoo, fresh off the record-smashing run of “The King’s Warden,” plays a police captain who saw the shooting up close. “He was right there when it happened, and he’s a cop, so he runs on instinct,” Yoo said of his character. “He chases his doubts about the case on foot, and that gives the film its momentum.”
Park, the everyman star of “Decision to Leave,” plays a newspaper editor on the trail of the case. It is his first film in four years and also marks his reunion with Hur a decade after “The Last Princess.”
“The director asked me for someone steady, a guy who just keeps pushing toward the truth like he’s done it all his life,” Park said. “I was grateful he trusted me with it, but it scared me a little.”
Perennial K-drama heartthrob Lee Min-ho rounds out the trio as a rookie reporter. At 40, he’s the youngest of the group, a point he was happy to poke fun at: “It’s not easy being the youngest anywhere at my age.”
A lot is riding on the season, too. Theaters are experiencing their best year since the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of admissions, and the Chuseok corridor is shaping up as the fall’s main event. “The Assassin(s)” opens against other major homegrown fare like Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love,” the Korean remake of “The Intern” and a new “Tazza” installment.
Yoo, for one, seemed happy with the crowded field. “Theaters seem to be getting their color back lately,” he said. “I’d love it if our film made that color a little brighter.”
Park compared the holiday slate to a well-laden table, while Lee closed out the event with a pitch of his own: “Every film has its own story to tell, so I hope people watch them all. Just watch ours first.”
“The Assassin(s)” opens in Korean theaters around the Chuseok holiday, which falls Sept. 24-26 this year. An exact date has yet to be announced.
