A Korean man in China takes an assassination job in South Korea to make money and find his missing wife. But when the job is botched, he is forced to go on the run from the police and the gangsters who paid him.
The Yellow Sea is showing in 1 cinema in New York City - next screening Tuesday 13 October at 18:40 at Metrograph.
Next screenings: Tuesday 13 October.
Full schedule
The Yellow Sea showtimes, refreshed every morning
Pick your cinema, get a nudge before it leaves screens.
Heart pounding, intensely bloody, and viciously violent. An up close exercise in gripping storytelling led by slow burning tension, insane chases, and brutal hand to hand axe/knife/bone combat... all framed within the Wild West Bermuda Triangle area where the borders of North Korea, China, and Russia meet. Spine tingling.
Na Hong-jin probably the goated in chasing genre. ーThe Wailing The Chaser The Yellow Sea Peak trilogy filmography.
Welcome to bleak shit the crime thriller, the absurdist pitch black dark comedy and the depressing as fuck drama.Gu-nam (played superbly by Ha Jung-woo) is a cab driver who lives in the region where the borders of North Korea, China and Russia come together. It's a tough area where most people turn to crimes for a living.Gu-nam's wife went to South Korea for work and he drowns his sorrow, frustration and mistrust about his wife in alcohol and mahjong, resulting in a huge debt to some criminals. The local crime boss Myun (played by Kim Yun-seok) makes Gu-nam an offer he cannot refuse. He sends Gu-na to Seoul for a contract killing in exchange for wiping his debt."The Yellow Sea" uses it's first 45 minutes to establish an incredibly dense, bleak and desperate atmosphere. Gu-nam's life is full of failures and he's always been a poor bastard in the truest sense of the word. His opening voice over narration about a dog he had as a kid that got rabies, then got nearly killed by the adults and fled to later return and just lay down and die immediately gives you an idea of where this story is headed.When Gu-na arrives in Seoul basically everything goes wrong and he sees himself hunted by the police, the local mob and his contractees. "The Yellow Sea" sucks you straight in with it's depressing atmosphere and then becomes a relentless chase and struggle to survive for it's closing two hours. (Yeah, I just wrote that. For it's closing two hours.)The score is superb with dynamic percussion, tense string arrangements and low, dark piano tones mixing and perfectly supplementing the images.And said images are full of movement and kinetic energy. "The Yellow Sea" is shot in dark images, void of bright colours and in a documentary like style almost exclusively using a steadycam. The visual style makes the sense of unease and dread even more urgent and ever present.The acting is good all around but Ha Jung-woo's performance as Gu-na is something special. The talent of conveying emotion with his eyes, of saying more than a thousand words with only his facial expressions is incredible. "The Yellow Sea" gives you a deep look into his mind but hardly explicitly states how he feels or why he acts the way he does. It's done in a subtle yet extremely satisfying way.Kim Yun-seok's crime boss Myun is like a murderous Korean werewolf version of Kim Bodnia. He looks like a bear and also fights like one. He's a proletarian criminal with frightening feral instincts and a logic adjusted to ensure his own survival only. There's no sophistication with this character but a way of hunting his prey that would make a grizzly proud."The Yellow Sea" is really a high energy thriller but somehow manages to bring in some really absurd, pitch black and dark yet totally welcome humour. There are moments where the violence will make you cringe and the chase sequences make you hold your breath but I also had to laugh out loud at least three times at somehow really hilarious situations.I have one major and spoilerish gripe with "The Yellow Sea" (so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen it yet and care!) and that's the enormous suspension of disbelief it starts to demand from the viewer once Gu-na jumps down from the fifth or sixth floor on a police car only to get up immediately and outrun a dozen policemen who chase him. It was one odd moment in a film that started in a very gritty fashion that felt realistic. But it doesn't stop there. Myun, while being a fascinating antagonist, turns out to be quite the supervillain. Like in superhuman villain. On a rewatch when I'll know what to expect I might enjoy it more but somehow taking a hundred times the abuse a well trained human could and still keep going makes the stakes feel less high than they should.The ending itself is enormous. It's extremely satisfying in being the exact opposite of what I was hoping for. It's really depressing stuff that feels both adequate to the story and also consistent with the atmosphere. It made me scream something like: "Fuck no! You gotta be kidding me! NO!" at my TV. That doesn't happen that often at all.Despite that one problem I have with "The Yellow Sea" it's nevertheless an extremely tense crime thriller full of brutal action, fast chase sequences, an amazing and bleak atmosphere and one really intriguing main character who's the kind of lowlife scumbag you'll like to root for. Describing a film as one hell of a ride has never been more appropriate.
A desperate taxi driver in China accepts a dangerous contract killing in South Korea to clear his debts and find his missing wife, only to be double-crossed and hunted.
The film was directed by Na Hong-jin in 2010, following his acclaimed breakout thriller The Chaser.
The film received numerous accolades at South Korean film ceremonies, including multiple awards for its lead performances and direction.
