The Villainess

Plenty of blood is spilled in the spectacular South Korean action film The Villainess. We are thrown right into it, when our heroine, the experienced assassin Sook-hee fights her way through a house full of drug criminals – in a sequence that recalls first person computer games and equals the intensity and brutality of action classics such as Tarantino's Kill Bill and Park Chan-wook's Oldboy .

Before the opening credits even roll, the number of casualties are in the three-digits. But once the dust settles, Sook-hee is arrested by the police and recruited, against her will, as undercover agent in an intellegence agency. After ten year service, she might be released, and so she enters a new life in which her daughter and the friendly (and handsome) neighbour Sung-joon are the only people she can relate to. Soon it turns out that her new ally, the law, is not to be trusted.

It comes as no suprise that Sook-he has certain problems adapting to the life of a law-abiding citizen. Likewise, The Villainess works best when it is allowed to be a hyper violent and energetic action story, culminating in an almost apocalyptic final sequence where Sook-he becomes her good, old self again. Cato Fossum

Jung Byung-gil is a filmmaker from South Korea. He studied at the Seoul Action School for stuntmen and -women, and his first film as a director was Action Boys (2008), a documentary about stunt on film. Before The Villainess, which bowed to standing ovations at the Cannes film festival in May, he directed the action thriller Confessions of Murder (2012).