Director Byun Sung-hyun was stunned when he first heard that his feature film Kill Boxing would be invited to Berlin International Film festival last month.
“I didn’t expect it at all,” he said at a press conference Kill Boxing held in Seoul earlier this month. “I thought Kill Bok-soon was not the type of film that would be selected by a festival like Berlin. It’s a genre movie. But the screening took place in an 1,800-seat theater and I was very moved to see the audience empathize with the story.”
The action thriller and Netflix original, which launches on the streaming service on March 31, follows the story of a female assassin named Boksoon (played by the talented Korean actress Jeon Do-yeon) who is also a single mother of a teenage daughter. The contrasts of the heroine’s life as a killer and mother form an interesting juxtaposition in the film, especially as the story progresses and the daughter confesses to having a crush on a girl at her school, revealing how both mother and daughter have been hiding . most important aspects of their lives. With a title and setting that refers to Kill Bill’s female assassin and John Wick‘s assassins, the film is full of stylish and choreographed action sequences and dystopian spaces.
Byun, an old fan of Jeon, winner of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for Lee Chang-dong’s Secret sunshinesays the film was inspired by his observations of the actress’s interactions with her real-life daughter.
“We met and had many conversations to get ideas for a movie, and I learned that there was a big gap between her roles as a mother and as an actress. Then I thought it would be interesting to show this juxtaposition through a character who is tasked with both raising a person and killing a person.
Byun, already known for the fine editing of his previous films The ruthless (2017) and Kingmaker (2022), wild power stunts and sword fighting scenes for Kill Boxing – a style of filmmaking that was totally new to Jeon.
“I was both grateful and uncomfortable when I was filming the action sequences,” he said. “In some scenes I was on the verge of giving up after watching the actors struggle so much. I finally said I’d work my way into it through editing, but the actors insisted they do it again. I was very grateful, but it was also quite painful to see them suffer. I told my director of photography that I would never make an action movie again.”
‘Death Boxoon’
No Ju-han/Netflix
The film is full of paradoxes. Aside from the heroine’s opposing roles as both killer and mother, Boksoon, her name, is an old-fashioned name usually used in rural areas for dogs or women.
“I couldn’t think of the heroine’s name for a while. I tend to use the names of the people I know when I write a script. Then one day [when we met], a name for Jeon’s aunt showed up on her phone as “Aunt Boksoon.” I immediately wanted to use that name. Jeon insisted she didn’t want to use the name, but I ended up using it anyway.’
Despite the stylized action scenes, the film also makes bold statements about capitalism and ethics in contemporary society. MK ENT, an agency that hires hundreds of hitmen in the movie, tells its employees that they are different from other independent agencies that hire freelancers and kill anyone (even children) for money. The movie opens with Booksoon on an assignment to kill a Japanese yakuza boss. But instead of killing him with a gun, she brings up a conversation she had with her daughter about fair competition and offers to fight him instead.
“Because it’s a genre film, I deliberately brought in a lot of conceptual dialogue that could resonate with the era we live in,” he says. “The movie delves into a lot of conflicting ideas and it wouldn’t make sense to emphasize the ethics because ultimately it’s a story about killing people. I think I wanted to say that everything in the world is contradictory and has both bad and good sides. If someone were to ask me ‘what is ethical’, my conclusion would be that you are fine as long as you don’t lose your sense of dignity.”
The film also pays tribute to the two veteran actors – Jeon and the old Korean protagonist Sol Kyung-gu, who plays the head of MK ENT and is secretly in love with Boksoon. The two actors appeared opposite each other at the start of their careers in Park Heung-sik’s 2001 romantic comedy, I wish I had a wife.
“There’s a line in the movie that being stabbed with old knives hurts more. It was my tribute to the two actors,” says Byun.
‘Death Boxoon’
No Ju-han/Netflix