The Old Woman with the Knife
If you want an American equivalent to rate “The Old Woman with the Knife” to, I think “John Wick” is possibly the closest to what Kyu-dong Min is looking at here. I’m sure there are others, but here we get a legendary assassin whose personal connections outside the life threaten her standing in her profession, and how they are threatened force her to make some choices. Oh, and there’s a dog.
Based on a series of books by Gu Byeong-mo, the screenplay by Kim Dong-wan and Kyu-dong Min tells an expansive narrative within a two hour time frame. We feel like we learn everything we need to know about Hornclaw (Lee Hye-yeong, in a fantastic performance), the old woman of the title, throughout the film. Abandoned by her family as a teenager, found covered in snow by a kind man, she becomes part of an agency that specializes in murder for hire. She’s one of the best, but she’s also on the older side. She begins to train a younger assassin named Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol). He’s a reckless one, and her training is made even trickier when she finds out that someone wants to kill her. When she unexpectedly befriends a vet and his daughter, things get more and more complicated.
“The Old Woman with the Knife” is structurally complex in how Kyu-dong Min tells their story, but it’s narratively fairly straightforward. The pace of the film is that of a crime drama, and film noir, but its heart is with tearing people up violently. When the action takes hold, it’s brutal and exciting to watch- with Hye-yeong being a strong center of the action- but it was the narrative that really won me over. As with the “Wick” movies, Hornclaw’s attempts to find connections outside of her violent world is where this film finds its soul, and I was enraptured. This is especially true as it reveals the true nature of some relationships, where people’s perceptions of events and their responsibilities can shift depending on how they viewed it. This is the sort of action movie that connects with me- one where it’s not just about the action, but when it gets to the action, it delivers. Kyu-dong Min knows what they want to say with this film, how they want to say it, and why it should connect. In a year where it seems fairly sparse for action fans in America, “The Old Woman with the Knife” is coming in right under the wire to deliver thrills and drama we can get engaged by.
