The Age of Shadows

A period drama pierced with elements of action & thriller that's polished in all filmmaking aspects and manages to be a tense, riveting ride for the majority of its runtime, The Age of Shadows maintains its gripping aura for the first two acts with its cleverly constructed & palpably tense cat-n-mouse premise but falters during the final act that feels a tad too drawn out & melodramatic. Worth a shot for the impressive set pieces it has in store.

If you said to me that a Korean Film can beat 95% of the top films produced in the last 20 years, I would have serious doubts. To explain, I am an Hollywood Worshipper, a Hollywood lover and a picture goer with strong views, likes and dislikes. What we have here is a film that is in the same 'sleeper league; as the ShawShank Redemption, a film with a wonderful story, script, a great cast and one of the best films I have seen for ages. It shown on British TV 23 October 2019, my wife put it on, when she saw it was Korean she lost interest and went to bed, big mistake, I stayed, and was totally hypnotised and absorbed with it, great technical strides have been made in the last 40 years in every department of film production - but in Korea, with a foreign cast, with no familiar names, a film made for adults not 11-year old children, without one car chase, or male film star whose next film is to save the world, or rescue it from Mr Evil Doom, this Korean film Age of Shadows, is one to be fond of, to watch again and again, and in some respects to relive your great film memories sitting in the Empire Cinema, Stockton on Tees, England, when sitting in the Nine-Penny seats watching the African Queen, All About Eve, or the Wizard of Oz, Yes, it is that good. Watch it.

Well, that was a lot of fun. The Age of Shadows is a spy thriller that is basically a ticking bomb and once things go wrong, it just gets brutal and chaotic. The set up for these characters and their plot is well put together enough to be engrossing. And the set pieces are just excitingly executed. The film is unafraid of showing something terrible from their consequences. Though there is one point at the third act where I wished the film had ended. It gets to feel a little too long as it goes on, but man, the train sequence alone is one hell of an exercise for suspense. The production is also too impressive and the acting is quite engaging. Overall, it's a dark and brutal, yet quite an edge of your seat cinematic thrill ride.

South Korean thrillers rarely misfire even if they aren't that well reviewed or rated. Coming for Kim Jee-woon, who masterfully directed "I Saw the Devil" and "A Bittersweet Life", "The Age of Shadows" makes a notable entry to his filmography. The Western audience doesn't really get to see period South Korean film set in early 20th century and it gives us a chance to perceive life on the Eastern front.

"The Age of Shadows" takes place in the 1920's around a back-and-forth game between a group of resistance fighters and Japanese agents. The film is deeply rooted in the Korean independence movement from the Empire of Japan. While most of the people back home wanted to gain independence, they could not do anything in front of the strong Japanese authorities. The key was to form resistance groups to overtake the Japanese dominion.

The film stars two of South Korea's biggest actors working in the industry today, Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun. They have paved the way of the South Korean new wave by delivering outstanding performances that helped the film industry achieve new heights. In "The Age of Shadows" they play on the opposite side of the fences, Song as a Korean police officer charged to sniff out the resistance and Lee as the leader of the resistance fighters. Lee's character begins to sense that the police officer can turn ways and be persuaded to help the resistance by feeding them information. At this point the wheels start to be in motion and it will be a very bumpy and eventful train ride, literally.

"The Age of Shadows" is a good period thriller with twists and turns that will keep you entertaining until the end.

I have to wonder if director Kim Jee-Woon titled this film in some part after the Melville WW2 film Army of Shadows. This isn't to get all movie trivia on you all, rather it's to make a small point about how Jee-Woon is doing two things in The Age of Shadows and doing them well: making a sort of homage to films about resistance movements and espionage during wartime (in a way this makes this a war film, but the front-lines are often with a few people behind closed doors, or trying to find people on a train who are incognito, or sides being reversed, with torture on the table for the side with power to those captured), and at the same time it's Jee-Woon making a film about his own country's history, when Korea was occupied by Japan, which adds a personal dimension to it.

While I'm sure if I was Korean I would have more of a connection to it - I actually didn't know as much about this history as I thought - knowing about other resistance and underground movements against occupying powers (and another film that comes to mind outside of Melville's film, which is much darker than this, is Inglourious Basterds) makes the drama palpable. Oh, and the actual conflicts and character dynamics pop every possible moments. It's a story about loyalty and honor, but also how difficult that really is: the point of view is mostly from Song Kang-Ho (remember him from Snowpiercer and The Host and other films by Bong Joon-Ho?), a Korean born officer for the Japanese police who was one years before part of the resistance against Japan, but has now gone to the side of conformity. But people underground, including Kim Woo-Jin who is wanted by the top Japanese police brass, see some potential in Hang-Ho's character, the conflict in him deep down, and look to "open his heart" to turn for them. Partially.

This is a complex film, and I'm sure on a first screening a few plot points here and there or little scenes made it so that I'm also sure a second screening might clear up a few things (it's a long film too at 140 minutes, not unlike Army of Shadows, so it's kind of dense viewing - not a bad thing, just what it is). In this complexity the filmmaker, who also is the writer, finds a lot of strong thematic connections, how we as the audience can fill in the gaps that might be questioning on how or why characters decide to do things, the journey for Lee Jung-Chool as alright cop to gray-area level traitor, and it doesn't shy away from gruesome details and moments. It doesn't dwell on things like the torture scenes, when resistance fighters who are captured and given burning skewers or ripped-off finger-nails, but it's important to show enough of that so it impacts certain characters. At the same time the violence is brutal but cut quick (not too quick, of course), which also brings back to mind Basterds.

What I mean to say going back to 'complex' is that you have to pay attention to it (you look at your phone while watching this for a second and you'll miss something, put it away, it's not that kind of movie - aside from that you'll miss the often exquisite filmmaking and those moments where the screws tighten like that entire sequence on the train that makes up a 20 minute chunk midway through). It treats its audience like adults who can take some very hard decisions from characters, and also how subtle cues can alert people to things, and yet at the same time there's even some humor here and there. When the main resistance guy gets introduced to Lee Jung-Chool, the way to make things a little less, uh, 'tense' is to go through an entire barrel of liquor. How this one minute of film is cut together, showing drink after drink tumbled down until the barrel is empty, is one of the funniest things this year - but, again, subtle-funny. It's more about character than anything else.

This is at times a rough film, its twists and turns confronting your expectations and making you question what's going to come next, and other times bleak and depressing. But it all leads up to a place that is phenomenal in terms of its dramatic arc and how the director builds up the kind of palpable suspense that shows he's watched his share of The Godfather a thousand times (but he makes it his own, it's not aped to annoyance). He's so assured that he goes past being one of the most skillful directors in Korea right now; The Age of Shadows confirms after massively entertaining and incredibly dark efforts like The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw the Devil as basically someone in the entire WORLD that should be cherished. This is a remarkable film, and one of the better, more harrowing efforts of 2016.