The Negotiation

Ha Chae-yoon is a crisis negotiator with the Seoul police, whose job is to reach an outcome by talking. One day a man appears on a screen: he has taken two hostages and says he will speak to nobody but her. He is calm, prepared, and does not say what he wants. As the conversation goes on it emerges that one of the hostages is from the police service and that what the man is really after is not money but something covered up in the past. Lee Jong-suk directs. Son Ye-jin plays Chae-yoon and Hyun Bin plays the man holding the hostages. The structure is built over a screen: the two characters are almost never in the same place and the whole narrative proceeds as a video call. That choice is both the film's strength and its limit. The tension depends on the faces and the rhythm of speech of two actors; against that, the narrative is physically static. The subject is the arms trade and a cover up in the ranks of the state; the genre is crime but the film ties itself to institutional corruption. Son Ye-jin and Hyun Bin appeared together afterwards in a television series, from which most of the pair's recognition comes. Its limit is the last section; the narrative speeds up as it resolves the tension and the explanations arrive on top of each other. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean crime films and thrillers set in one place. Who it is not for: the plot is familiar, the ending is rushed, and telling it over a screen becomes repetitive after a while.