Producer: Min Jin-soo   Director: Min Kyu-dong   Screenplay: Min Kyu-dong and Kim Dong-wan   Cast: Lee Hye-young, Kim Sung-cheol, Yeon Woo-jin, Kim Moo-yul, Shin Sia, Kim Kang-woo, Yang Ju-mi, Yoon Chae-na and Mitch Craig   Distributor: Well Go USA

Grade: B

Movies about assassins-for-hire have become depressingly frequent, but Min Kyu-dong’s is better than most. Adapted from “Pagwa,” a 2013 novel by Gu Byeong-mo translated into English as “The Old Woman with the Knife” (2022) by Kim Chi-young, it mixes spectacular fight sequences with an intricately constructed, if ultimately rather simple, revenge plot.  It’s all set against the biography of an ageing hit-woman nearing the end of her career and challenged by a young colleague.

In some superficial respects that seems to suggest a gender-reversal cousin of Simon West’s “Old Guy” from earlier this year, in which Christoph Waltz played a hit-man being forced to help train an up-and-coming replacement (Cooper Hoffman).  But West’s picture was a jokey if violent piece in Guy Ritchie mode; Min’s film, while even more violent, is moody, dark, and, given its outlandish elements, extremely self-serious.  But it’s also engrossing despite its often funereal pacing and complicated structure.

Lee Hye-young is the legendary hit-woman variously nicknamed Nails, Hornclaw and the Godmother.  She was initiated into the business while, as a homeless young woman (Shin Sia), she was rescued from the streets by Ryu (Kim Moo-yul), a kindly shop owner who brought her into his “human pest extermination” business after she’d killed an American soldier (Mitch Craig) who tried to rape her.  A montage over the opening credits gives glimpses of her storied career in the trade.

Now in her sixties, Hornclaw works in an agency overseen by Sohn (Kim Kang-Woo), who, aided by his mousy secretary (Yang Ju-mi), runs the place according to the principles Ryu had established before his death (shown in a flamboyant flashback).  She’s committed to the ideals the place has long represented, like dealing with an older operative nicknamed Gadget who’s muffed an assignment by allowing him emotional distress to cloud his judgment.

What’s she’s not prepared for is the arrival of Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a young assassin brought into the operation by Sohn after hearing of his prowess on the docks.  Bullfight has a sadistic streak—when tasked with bringing in a target’s ring, for example, he responds with an elegant box that turns out to contain all the man’s neatly severed fingers—and an intense interest in Hornclaw, a hostility that proves to be more than professional jealousy. 

In order to take her down, Bullfight uses Hornclaw’s sympathy for Dr. Kang (Yeon Woo-jin), a widower with a young daughter named Haeni (Yoon Chae-na).  Kang, a veterinarian who persuades Hornclaw to adopt a stray dog she’s brought in for treatment (he names the mutt Braveheart), has mounted a solitary protest for five years outside the hospital where his wife’s surgery was botched, demanding an apology.  Hornclaw is touched by his devotion, and when Bullfight threatens them, she intervenes, as he knew she would.  He taunts her as a pagwa, a bruised fruit that should be tossed out—a reference to some of the produce in the stand presided over by Kang’s mother-in-law.  Bullfight’s festering antagonism, the cause of which is gradually revealed, naturally culminates in a final face-off with Hornclaw, a prolonged affair involving a small army he’s hired. 

Some may complain that the structure Min imposes on the story, replete with flashbacks and conversations delivered very deliberately, makes a fairly simple story unnecessarily dense and complex.  But the elegance of the result is justification enough.  Lee Jae-wo‘s cinematography brings out the best in Bae Jung-yoon’s production design, with some magical shots set in falling snow, and together with Jeong Ji-eun’s editing not only gives a hazily melancholy feel to the flashbacks but visceral energy to the vivid action set-pieces; Kim Jin-seong’s atmospheric score adds to the plaintive tone.

The two leads, meanwhile, offer a fascinating contrast, both charismatic but in very different ways.  Lee Hye-young is unnervingly potent in her quiet intensity, while Kim Sung-cheol is febrile and volcanic.  They complement one another well.  The supporting cast are all fine, with Shin Sia particularly striking as the young “Nails,” her scenes with Kim Moo-yul’s Ryu especially effective.

“The Old Woman with the Knife” is good enough to make the tired professional assassin genre worth watching again, at least briefly.

Producers: Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz and Anthony Vaccarello   Director: David Cronenberg   Screenplay: David Cronenberg   Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Jeff Yung, Eric Weinthal, Vieslav Krystyan and Ingvar Sigurdsson   Distributor: Janus/Sideshow

Grade: B

“How dark are you willing to go?” is a question that David Cronenberg has been asking audiences for more than fifty years.  Some viewers have responded enthusiastically to the invitation to follow him, even when the director has taken his exploration of forces that transform the human body from within and without to extreme levels.  Others have declined, finding even his more conventional, accessible films too chilly, austere and obscure for their taste and his more distinctive offerings repellent.        

In “The Shrouds” Cronenberg puts the question into the mouth of his protagonist Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), who’s made up to look a bit like the director and has suffered the loss of his wife, as Cronenberg has.  But one shouldn’t try to take the comparison very far.

Karsh delivers the line near the film’s opening, after an introductory scene set in the office of his dentist (Eric Weinthal), who informs him that his teeth are rotting from grief.  Perhaps in response, he goes on a date set up by the doctor, hosting Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at an elegant restaurant situated incongruously in the middle of a cemetery.  He explains that though he’s had a career as a maker of technical films, he now owns both the restaurant and its odd locale, a very unusual cemetery indeed. 

As his wife Rebecca (Diane Kruger) was being prepared for burial, he says, he felt the urge to get into the coffin with her.  So he designed a system that simulated doing so: called GraveTech, it involves covering the corpse in a shroud equipped with a scanning system that provides an extraordinarily detailed feed (“encrypted, pun intended,” he adds) recording the body’s deterioration.  “I’m in the grave with her,” Karsh says, which will become truer when after his death he will be buried beside her.  The other tombstones are similarly equipped, allowing bereaved families equally intimate connection with their dearly departed.

Sandra is intrigued, but is apparently uninterested in a second date.  Karsh instead spends some time with his sister-in-law Terry Gelernt (also Kruger), Rebecca’s twin, who abandoned her career as a veterinarian and is now a dog groomer, a job she finds more amenable.  She also occasionally boards canines while their owners are away.  He shares with her his concerns about some odd growths he’s noticed in the recent scans of his wife’s bones.  Are they caused by the cancer that ended her life, or something more sinister?  Otherwise he’s content to have his life kept in order by Hunny (also voiced by Kruger), a virtual assistant created for him by his brother-in-law Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce), Terry’s technically adept but emotionally neurotic ex-husband.  He also, however, experiences flashbacks—or waking hallucinations—of Rebecca returning from her treatments, parts of her body removed and pained by his attempt to hug her brittle bones.       

Karsh is soon confronted by a serious business problem: someone has desecrated the cemetery, toppling over some of the headstones and disrupting the scanners’ transmissions.  His project director Gray Foner (Elizabeth Saunders) will handle reconstruction and customer relations, but he will have to deal with larger issues—the expansion of the GraveTech system throughout the world, including to a site in Budapest proposed by a terminally ill mogul, Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystan), whose blind wife Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) comes to Toronto to confer with him.  The two develop a warm friendship that seems destined to develop into something more intense, especially after Karsh discovers that his planned burial plot is already occupied by the corpse of Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), Rebecca’s oncologist, with whom she was having an affair during her illness but who has suddenly disappeared.

The plot gravitates into conspiratorial territory when Maury detects that someone has hacked into the GraveTech system, perhaps from Iceland, where Karsh’s associate Elvar (Ingvar Sigurdsson) reports to him about a cemetery site there.  But Maury is an unreliable source, suspicious that Karsh is having an affair with Terry, with whom he hopes to reconcile.  He also claims to be controlling Hunny and to have worked with those who desecrated the cemetery, a group he identifies with Russian interests.  Karsh also comes to suspect the motives of the Chinese firm that has provided financial backing for GraveTech, as well as Dr. Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung), another of Rebecca’s oncologists, whom he consults about those inexplicable growths on his dead wife’s bones.  The upshot is a suggestion that Chinese and Russian intelligence services might be attempting to develop the Shroud technology into a surveillance system that would go beyond the dead to the wider population.  And Terry, a conspiracy theorist, encourages that idea.

If all this seems more than a little complicated, that’s because it is, and Cronenberg isn’t interested in tying all he threads together in a neat little package.  His purpose, as usual, is to provoke thought about the human condition, not merely to shock, and as usual he’s willing to admit that the questions he poses are really insoluble. There are elements of horror here—the close-ups of decaying bodies (and the consequences of Rebecca’s medical treatment) are deeply unsettling, though quite restrained in comparison to the gore-filled excess commonplace in today’s Hollywood shockers.  But “The Shrouds” is a cerebral exercise rather than a visceral thriller, proceeding largely through dialogue rather than action.  But it’s typically Cronenbergian in terms of its themes and preoccupations, and though slow, solemn and ultimately perplexing, it fits perfectly into his remarkable body of work.

It’s also typically elegant.  Carol Spier’s production is frostily beautiful, and set off gorgeously in Douglas Koch’s steely cinematography, the icy visuals italicized by Howard Shore’s brooding score.  Christopher Donaldson’s deliberate editing gives the plot room to unfold without rush, and the cast time to add grace notes to their characters.  Cassel is suitably unflappable as Karsh, while Kruger brings remarkable variety to her multiple roles.  Pearce, having a banner year, makes Maury totally different from the imperious Harrison Van Buren of “The Brutalist”—weak, querulous, and obsessed. The rest of the cast do what is required of them without fuss, including a dog with the incongruous name of Paddington.

“The Shrouds” may not stand among Cronenberg’s best, but it’s a worthy addition to an extraordinary oeuvre that has maintained its unique personality for more than half a century.