Lunar New Year Hits and Promising February Titles
If 2018 ended on a down note for the Korean film industry, in the wake of several major box office disappointments, the mood has quickly turned around in 2019 as the first few months of the year have welcomed record returns for local films with more promising titles about to join the fray.
Memories of last December were swiftly erased when two mid-sized titles (
MAL·MO·E: The Secret Mission and
The Dude in Me) turned into surprise early January hits, but the real fireworks started in the lead up to this year’s Lunar New Year holidays. The 2018 festivities welcomed four big local titles, yet by comparison this year’s top Lunar New Year offering (
Extreme Job) is on track to gross over three times the combined totals of the whole holiday lineup from last year.
On the back of that record performance, a number of well-received titles are crowding the February release schedule which bodes for the industry as audience confidence toward original local content seems to have been restored.
This week, KoBiz takes a look at the recently released Lunar New Year heavy hitters, both currently in theaters, and the main local titles arriving this month.
Extreme Job (January 23)
Every so often a comedy breaks out in a big way in Korea and the connecting thread between those lucky few, aside from a strong sense of local humor and a good script, is a clever and easily understood concept. 2013’s Lunar New Year champ
Miracle in Cell No.7 featured a room of convicts conspiring to bring a daughter to live with her father in prison; in
LUCK-KEY (2016), a master hitman becomes an amnesiac and inadvertently switches places with a hapless out-of-work actor. Now, in
Extreme Job, a detective squad goes undercover in a fried chicken restaurant, only for the establishment to become an overnight sensation.
Hit-and-Run Squad (January 30)
The other big title that coincided with the holidays was the action-thriller
Hit-and-Run Squad, the far more ambitious sophomore outing of
HAN Jun-hee, whose well received debut
Coin Locker Girl (2015) premiered in the Critics Week lineup of the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. Hot on the heels of her leading role in
LEE Kwon’s acclaimed mystery-thriller
Door Lock (2018), a remake of the modern Spanish genre classic
Sleep Tight,
KONG Hyo-jin stars as a detective who is demoted to a lowly position in a traffic squad, where she is partnered with a lively young officer with a secret past, played by
RYU Jun-yeol of
Believer (2018). The pair find themselves going head-to-head with a vicious young corporate head who terrorizes the streets of Seoul at night in his fast cars, played by
JO Jung-suk, who was on screens last December alongside
SONG Kang-ho in
The Drug King (2018).
HAN’s latest combines the appeal of car-themed action-thrillers from overseas such as the
Fast and the Furious franchise, and local themes of corporate corruption, which include JO’s antagonist, who has drawn parallels with the villain of
RYOO Seung-wan’s
Veteran (2015), played by
YOO Ah-in.
Innocent Witness (February 13)
Six years after his last film, dramatic specialist
LEE Han, whose most famous work is the endearing teacher-student drama
Punch (2011) with
KIM Yun-seok and
YOO Ah-in, is back in theaters with another pair of stars joining forces against the odds.
Innocent Witness stars
JUNG Woo-sung (
Steel Rain, 2017) as a poor defense attorney who works on humanitarian cases, who takes on a new client when a housekeeper is charged with killing her elderly employer. The only potential witness to the crime is a young girl with Asperger’s, played by
KIM Hyang-gi of the enormously successful
Along with the Gods films. Like LEE’s other works, which also include
Thread of Lies (2014),
Innocent Witness uses strongly drawn characters in a heartwarming story that explore several social issues on its fringes.
Svaha: The Sixth Finger (February 20)
Exploring similar territory to
YEON Sang-ho’s gritty indie animation
The Fake (2013) through a style that is reminiscent of
NA Hong-jin’s
THE WAILING (2016), JANG’s latest looks at an unseemly side of Korean society, where Christian groups are very powerful, but some opportunists have sought to take advantage of congregations.