‘Harbin’: Toronto Review

Dir: Woo Min-ho. South Korea. 2024. 108mins

The refined pleasure of director Woo Min-ho’s gripping historic spy drama Harbin lies in its painstaking craft. Evocative lighting and detailed interval recreation body the 12 months 1909, 4 years after the Eulsa Treaty turned the nation right into a colony of Japan. Lt Normal Ahn Jung-geun (Hyun Bin) and the Independence Military are working to revive Korea’s statehood, which they hope to attain by assassinating Japanese Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi. This seeming suicide mission is rendered extra fraught by the presence of a mole within the group, and by the pursuit of the bloodthirsty Japanese Captain Mori Tatsuo (Park Hoon). 

The motion is fantastically composed

Having beforehand directed investigative thrillers like Spies and Inside Males, Woo is comfy combining efforts with co-writer Kim Kyoung-chan to conjure intrigue. The presence of Hyun Bin, one in every of South Korea’s largest stars who made his identify within the well-liked interval piece The Deadly Attraction and the fierce actioner Confidential Task, will give the movie a ready-made viewers. Harbin premiered in Toronto boasting robust star energy, an intense narrative and tightly choreographed set items – all of which ought to assist it garner some business curiosity.

A lot of Harbin’s drama originates within the unusual honor of Ahn. Because the movie opens, he’s trudging his approach over a frozen river earlier than crashing into a gathering held by his Independence Military comrades. Drained and breathless, he should clarify to them why he’s not a traitor. Forty days beforehand, Ahn led the Independence Military to a rousing victory over the Japanese troops however, quite than execute the POWs, he let Captain Mori and different Japanese troopers go free. They regrouped and slaughtered Ahn’s remaining males, leaving Ahn because the lone survivor.

To redeem himself and save the motion, Ahn hatches a plan to smuggle himself and a few comrades into Russia to assassinate Hirobumi. As they start to kind arms with a smuggler named Ms. Gong (Jeon Yeo-been), nonetheless, it turns into clear there’s a mole of their midst.

Whereas Hyun is great because the honorable but naive Ahn, the precise character is pretty underdeveloped. He’s psychologically distant, missing any interiority. The identical might be mentioned of his compatriots, males like Kim Sang-hyun (Jo Woo-jin) and Woo Deok-soon (Park Jeong-min). Each are too primary to push the advanced mechanisations required for a back-stabbing subplot to wholly take maintain. Nonetheless, the precise plotting, tightly wound by screenwriters Kim and Woo, performs sufficient pleasing shifts to stoke the movie’s pressure. 

What Harbin lacks in memorable characters, it greater than makes up for in its staging and craft. The motion is fantastically composed, with set items that leap from woodland to abandon and concrete settings. The opening battle sequence in a snowy forest is vicious, slowed to poetic pace: faces are shoved in mud, heads are sawn off and males desperately wander in a daze for the following kill.

One other thrilling set piece entails a brawl in a claustrophobic prepare carriage that has a lot vigour, it’s typically returned to all through the movie in flashback. DoP Hong Kyeong-pyo delicately switches aesthetics, alternating between brutal spectacle, shadow-soaked noir-stained interiors, and black and white flashbacks that intimate the no man’s land of loyalty on this battle for independence.