QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM MOTELX

Despite its title, The Old Woman with the Knife opens in 1975 with a young woman (Shin Si-ah), just 16. Bloody, desperate and at rock bottom, she is staggering ill clothed and barefoot in the snow at night, and collapses with exhaustion in the middle of the road. Where other cars drive past, Ryu (Kim Mu-yeol) and his pregnant wife take her to their American-style diner, feed her, and offer her board and lodgings in exchange for help in the kitchen. After the girl violently resists a sexual assault from an American soldier, Ryu sees her potential, and recruits her into his secretive operation exterminating ‘vermin’, which is to say, any corrupt or criminal elements (like her rapist) who make ordinary citizens’ lives hell.

So far, so Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990), or more aptly, Jung Byng-gil’s The Villainess (2017) – except that writer/director Min Kyu-dong’s innovation is to focus less on this woman’s youthful initiation into murderous vigilantism, and more on her autumn years, decades later, when her immense experience in assassination has been offset by physical decline. Ryu himself is long dead, murdered in the line of duty – and the traumatic impact of Ryu and his family’s bloody demise has left our spry, grey-haired antiheroine largely cut off from her better feelings, so that her cold-bloodedness creeps out even her closest colleagues. Meanwhile Ryu’s small backroom operation has turned into a large organised outfit, now run by the lame Sohn (Kim Kang-woo) like a pay-for-hit business with a greatly reduced ethos of righteousness. As young, sadistic killer Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol) joins the group and immediately positions himself as Hornclaw’s rival, she must decide whether she can still live up to her own considerable legend, or if, and indeed how, she should bow out. It does not help that her encounters with a stray old dog in need of some tender care and affection (metaphor alert!) and with kindly young veterinarian father Dr Kang (Yeon Woo-jin) are reawakening her empathy, which jeopardises her work.

“Out with the old, in with the new” may appear to be the initial guiding principle here, but in fact Min’s film will show that there is no school quite like the old school. More importantly, all these adult characters are haunted by pasts that have sent them down their life trajectory. As old Hornclaw and young Bulldog circle each other, and one or more set-piece showdowns seem inevitable, what also becomes clear is that these two assassins’ histories are closely intertwined, and in a way Hornclaw has made Bulldog who he is as much as Ryu made her. Both these characters are more complex than they first appear, and their eventual clashes, though certainly hyperviolent, are as much melodramatic opera as bullet (and blade) ballet, all playing out in an abandoned amusement park, i.e. the literal ruins of lost childhood.

The Old Woman with the Knife unfolds over many decades in a world – our world – full of malevolent people and cruel action. Yet while Hornclaw is set up as (part of) a ruthless remedy for all this injustice, the film constantly presents her Agency as just another organised crime group, remarkably similar to the ones it takes out – and it exposes Hornclaw’s affectlessness to be all at once a necessity for her professional efficiency and edge, and a fatal flaw for any of her dealings in the supposed service of good. She is a difficult character, long since beyond the pale morally – yet even as she races towards the death that she knows, as we all do, must come in the end, this old dog proves still capable of learning new tricks, and realises that it is never too late to correct her course and go out with a bang. Like the principal character in Karl R. Hearne’s The G (2023) Hornclaw may, at the centre of her film, seem out of place in a contemporary cinematic landscape that more typically worships youth, but the readiness with which others either underestimate or completely overlook her is one of her greatest strengths. One thing is for sure: no one would ever describe this unusual, elderly protagonist as retiring.

The Old Woman with the Knife just premiered at MOTELX, in Portugal.