Humint

A Korean spy film set in Vladivostok. Cho is an intelligence officer on the southern side. He is tracking an international criminal syndicate; drugs and human trafficking. He is bargaining with a woman in the opening. Someone who escaped from the north; she will give information and get help in return. It goes badly. The north's men are in the same region. They have a job too and both sides are looking at the same name. From there the film runs two intelligence services alongside each other. Neither wants the other, both are after the same organisation, and a forced partnership forms. The Russian far east is a character in itself. A port, snow, smuggling routes, and an in-between zone where nobody officially exists. An incident at the border is the trigger. The narrative goes back and opens whose work it was. Trust is the centre. Every character has a superior and what the superiors provide is incomplete. What the narrative is interested in is not espionage but the person used: the term in the title means intelligence gathered directly from human sources rather than by technical means, and the film describes what becomes of those sources. The action is in Ryoo Seung-wan's known manner. Fighting in tight spaces, handheld camera, sparse cutting. This counts as the third of the director's films set abroad; the earlier ones are The Berlin File from 2013 and Escape from Mogadishu from 2021. The budget was sixteen million dollars; the box office stopped at thirteen point three million. The running time is a hundred and nineteen minutes. It opened on 11 February 2026. Zo In-sung, Park Jeong-min, Park Hae-joon and Shin Se-kyung are in the cast. Ryoo Seung-wan wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Korean spy and action films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting novelty; the narrative stays inside the genre's known shapes and most of its characters are thin.