A Dark ‘Day’
Director Kim Sung-Su reunites with his ‘Asura’ leads for a cinematically thrilling replay of a dark slice of Korean history.
12.12: The Day
Director: Kim Sung-su • Writers: Hong In-pyo, Hong Won-chan, Lee Young-jong, Kim Sung-su
Starring: Hwang Jung-min, Jung Woo-sung, Lee Sung-min, Park Hae-Joon, Kim Sung-kyun
South Korea • 2hrs 21mins
Opens Hong Kong May 16 • IIA
Grade: A-
The way Hwang Jung-min plays him, 1980s South Korean strongman and dictator Chun Doo-hwan was a thin-skinned petty little bitch who so badly needed to prove himself he decided a power grab in an illegal coup d’etat and subjecting his fellow citizens to a decade of illegal arrests, trumped up charges, civilian massacres and otherwise despotic rule would be the way to go. Now, no one is saying the maniacal general Hwang plays in 12.12: The Day | 서울의 봄 is Chun Doo-hwan; you can’t really say that thanks to some pretty strident Korean libel laws. But Hwang’s General Chun Doo-gwang (seriously, all it takes is two letters?) is a remarkable stand-in for the notorious insurrectionist. We all know who he’s supposed to be.
Koreans certainly know who he’s supposed to be, considering the chronicle of the December 12 1979 coup that put the country on a dark, dark, path for most of the ’80s was Daehanminguk’s biggest box office hit of 2023 (almost US$100 million on budget one-fifth of that). 12.12: The Day makes a spectacular – if utterly gutting – companion piece to 2007’s May 18, about the run-up to the Gwangju Uprising, 2013’s The Attorney, about a group of book club students arrested without warrants for being North Korean “sympathisers”, and A Taxi Driver and 1987: When the Day Comes (both from 2017), about a cabbie who gets pulled into the events of the Gwangju Massacre and, finally, the day Chun succumbed to national elections in 1987, effectively ending Korea’s authoritarian years. Immersing us in the shady halls of power through 1970s cinema language – cinematographer Lee Mo-Gae goes all in on split screens, grainy film and conspiratorial shadows – Kim’s also spun a spectacular companion piece to classic political thrillers like Costa-Gavras’s Z, John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May and Fred Zinnemann’s Day of the Jackal. It earned its haul.
Hagiography only goes so far
Striking a balance between a deadly serious subject and genre storytelling’s demands for propulsive suspense is always a dicey proposition. Lean too heavily into the historical details and the film becomes a preachy slog. Rely too much on action and white-knuckle tension and it loses any heft. Kim and co-writers Hong In-pyo (a first-timer), Hong Won-chan (Deliver Us from Evil) and Lee Young-jong (The Roundup) thread a very tricky needle to keep the narrative engaging while also posing some interesting, if unspoken, questions. They get help from nearly faultless editing that keeps the players in order without sacrificing story construction or pacing, and drops crucial character moments into the action. Pulling editing duties here is Kim Sang-beom: JSA, Oldboy, The Man from Nowhere, Decision to Leave. Ya think buddy knows what he’s doing?
Those character moments are important, because the real meat of the film is in Kim’s willingness to turn the spotlight on the people who were at the heart of nine of Korea’s most pivotal hours. The action picks up after the assassination of the previous dictator, Park Chung-hee, in October, which Chun is leading the investigation into. Seeing the time to strike, he amasses a posse of Hanahoe (“a group of one”) yes men, led by Noh Tae-Gun (Park Hae-Joon, Broker, Emergency Declaration), and starts browbeating the elected president (Jeong Dong-Hwan) into signing an arrest warrant for Jeong Sang-ho (Lee Sung-min, The Spy Gone North), the army chief of staff he’s had arrested for Park’s murder. Jeong doesn’t trust Chun as far as he can throw him, and Chun wants him eliminated. Problem is the president won’t circumvent the constitution, and needs the AWOL minister of defence (Kim Eui-Sung, Alienoid) to sign off. The stalemate leads to a stand-off between Chun, mobilising to physically seize the capital, and Capital Garrison Commander Lee Tae-shin (an avatar for Jang Tae-wan, played by Jung Woo-sung in a career best performance). Lee is not having this foolishness, and he mobilises his own military allies to stop Chun.
It’s easy to see why Kim opted for the conventions of the political thriller for this story. The politics are there (duh) but the thriller elements keep us engaged and inquisitive. That’s how the peripheral details seep in and take root. Lee is as staunch in his defence of the state and the nation as Chun is in taking it for himself. Hwang’s big, loud performance – laced with moments of genuine menace and hints of what’s to come – comes right up the line of parody, but stays grounded enough to remind us how dangerous Chun really is. The quiet passages, where Lee chats with his wife ahead of what he knows is his endgame and the fatherly protection one soldier offers a much younger one, never let us, as viewers of history, forget the countless people that are about to suffer under Chun’s reign – or die trying to end it. Through it all the spectre of Park’s just concluded dictatorship hovers. At one point you realise Lee and Jeong (who happened to land on the right side of history) are military lifers, who served under Park during his repressive regime. Are they who we want to “win”? Why didn’t the Americans act when the defence minister sought refuge in their Embassy? What was to be gained? As a final grace note, the film’s title in Korean translates to “Seoul Spring”, an ironic phrase suggesting the hoped for brightness after Park’s dark winter is officially dead in the water. No surprise there. The Prague Spring of 1968 ended just as abruptly. 12.12: The Day winds up doubling as a historical drama and a cautionary tale, because with extremism and paranoia being nurtured we know it could happen again. Lord only knows what Chun could have done with Twitter. — DEK