The Throne

The Throne (2015) dramatises one of the most notorious episodes in Korean history: King Yeongjo sealing his son, Crown Prince Sado, inside a rice chest and leaving him to die. It happened in 1762. The film opens with those eight days and works backwards through flashbacks. The tension is therefore never about what happens, only about why. What it is actually about is not court intrigue but a father and a son. The king has to be a flawless ruler and expects the same of his heir. Sado buckles under that and then comes apart. There are moments where each of them is right, and the film declines to choose between them. The charge holding it together is between Song Kang-ho and Yoo Ah-in. Song Kang-ho is the actor most Western viewers know from Parasite, and he is working in a completely different register here. The costume and court protocol work is meticulous. Good for: Korean cinema, historical drama, and stories about families destroying each other. Less good for: it contains suicide, a mental health collapse and the death of a child. Anyone expecting action or a brisk historical epic will not find it.