Secretly, Greatly

An elite agent sent from North Korea is placed in a small neighbourhood in the South. His cover is the village idiot: Bang Dong-gu, a young man who falls over, shouts and gets laughed at all day. For two years no order comes. In that time the neighbourhood takes him in, the woman at the shop mothers him, and Dong-gu starts losing the difference between the part and himself. Then two more agents arrive and the order finally comes: all three are to kill themselves. The first half is comedy and the second is entirely tragedy, and the change is abrupt. The real subject is the regime's logic of expendable people; three young men are kept waiting for years and then erased with a stroke of a pen. Jang Cheol-soo directed, from Hun's 2010 webcomic Covertness. Kim Soo-hyun plays Dong-gu, with Park Ki-woong and Lee Hyun-woo as the other two agents. It opened on 5 June 2013 and broke a run of records in South Korea: the highest opening day for a domestic film, the most tickets sold in a single day, and the fastest to a million admissions, which took thirty-six hours. Who it is for: anyone who likes Korean action melodrama and comic adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone wanting consistency of tone. The shift from comedy to tragedy is sudden, the last section leans hard on slow motion and music, and the three deaths are drawn out.