Cynical to the point of nihilism, this 2023 Korean box office hit is touted as a political thriller, though it’s really just another bloody gangster fable that happens to take place against the background of the 1992 general election. Politics simply provides the craven excuse for everybody to act on their worst impulses. At the center is Jeon Hae-woong (Cho Jin-woong), an earnest Busan city assemblyman whose ambition is to be elected to Parliament representing his district of Haeundae, which is undergoing a contentious redevelopment. Those with a stake in the project would rather have a candidate who’s firmly in their pocket and rig the election so that a rookie gets the nomination for the Democratic Party, which always wins in this district. Undeterred, Jeon launches a campaign as an independent after bribing a city hall insider to make copies of the redevelopment plan, which he then passes on to a crooked gangster-developer, Jang-ho (Kim Min-jae), who can use it to invest in the targeted land before the plans are made public. In return, Jang-ho promises to bankroll Jeon, but when the local Democratic Party fixer, Kwon Soon-tae (Lee Sung-min), gets wind of Jeon’s machinations, he goes all-out to steal the ballot boxes in order to guarantee his man gets elected.

From that point, Jeon, whose dreams of political ascension are now considerably fueled by his desire for revenge, turns a corner and never looks back, and as a protagonist the character is a convincing portrait of unalloyed ambition in the form of a seemingly inept operator, which fools his adversaries, including Kwon, into thinking that he’s a pushover. Lee Won-tae’s witty and streamlined script has just enough surprises to keep the viewer sufficiently distracted from his hackneyed direction, and most are provided by the supporting characters, including Pil-do (Kim Mu-yeol), the local loan shark who prefers to think of himself as a simple “hooligan” and provides Jeon with the appropriate “muscle” for his scheme; a cagey female newspaper reporter (Park Se-jin) whose carefully measured blend of journalistic principle and ruthlessness makes her almost a match for the wannabe alpha males who stray into her orbit; and a bunch of prosecutors who think they’re hot stuff but can never keep up with the bad guys. 

In fact, it’s exhausting trying to parse motives since no one has any redeeming traits, and the only people who could be considered “innocent” either die miserably or are relegated to less-than-nothing status. This is dark shit, and in order to extract any conventional entertainment value from the amoral proceedings you have to choose which bad guys to root for. If this were a European production, there would be all sorts of existential insights served up with the atrocious behavior, but this is Korea, where the audience simply gets off on it. 

In Korean. Opens Nov. 15 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Devil’s Deal home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Plus M Entertainment and Twin Film/B.A. Entertainment