Steel Rain

During an attempted coup in North Korea the country's leader is badly wounded. Eom Chul-woo, a former North Korean special operations agent, takes him and flees to South Korea. There he meets Kwak Chul-woo, foreign affairs secretary in the presidential office. The two men have the same name, are on opposite sides, and are holding the possibility of a nuclear war. Yang Woo-seok directs, from his own webcomic. Jung Woo-sung plays Eom, Kwak Do-won plays Kwak. The interesting thing is that it treats North Korea not as a monolithic threat but as a structure divided internally. The coup faction and the leader are separate, and the narrative runs not between two states but among four or five groups. The relationship between the leads is the centre. Two men with the same name stand for two societies speaking the same language who have not seen each other in thirty years, and the film says so directly. It did well commercially in Korea. A sequel, Steel Rain 2: Summit, followed in 2020, with the same director and actors but different characters and an independent story. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean political thrillers and films about the North and South. Who it is not for: the political detail is dense and hard to follow without knowing the region's history, and the action is hard.