The Old Woman with the Knife

(파과)

dir: Min Kyu-dong

2025

I’ve never pretended to be an expert on South Korean culture or South Korean movies, but I can definitively say that they sometimes make great films.

This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to remind yourself of that fact.

This flick is okay, though. It is essentially a South Korean take on John Wick, just with a woman of the same age in the role, and instead of killing thousands of people she only kills a hundred or so. It must be a modesty thing.

The strongest element in this flick’s favour is that it delivers exactly what the title promises: There is an older South Korean woman in this flick, and she is often shown holding a variety of knives, with which she usually kills people. Or she at least harms them greatly and gets them to reconsider the life choices that brought them to this moment in time.

On the other hand you could argue that instead of being an example of truth in advertising, that it’s actually false advertising because, like in a lot of South Korean action flicks, sure they start off with knives, but then by the end there’s guns akimbo, hammers and anything else that comes to hand involved.

There isn’t anything particularly unusual or novel about this flick, but it has something of a more melodramatic premise than these kinds of flicks usually require. I mean the aforementioned Keanu Reeves franchise used the murder of the protagonist’s dog as the starting point of a 4 movie killing spree that killed most of the (assassin) population of three continents. This flick, again about a stone cold killer, really leans in to the (fairly generic) premise of that stone cold killer having at least one thing or one person or one group of people that they really care about to justify all the wickedness that is to come.

As for the personality or character of our protagonist Nails / Hornclaw (Lee Hye-young), I can’t really tell you much about her, and I’ve watched the flick in its entirety. She’s in her sixties, she’s been a legendary killer for decades, she’s maybe not as lethal as she used to be due to something happening neurologically, but however much she falls or looks helpless, when whatever it is she cares about is threatened, she’ll take a dozen stabbings, hits to the head or gunshot wounds and still keep on truckin’. Just like the protagonist of every single one of these kinds of movies.

There’s a tragic backstory, there’s a youth being taken in by some kind people in the 1970s which results in her becoming a member of some organisation that takes the heavy burden upon itself of killing the bad people that are out there, and then there’s, you’ll never believe this, things that happened in the past, murders committed by our heroic pensioner assassin, that have repercussions in the present.

The children of people she cared about, the children of people she murdered, they persist, grow up, thrive or its opposite, and cause problems at a time when perhaps other people her age are tending to their hobbies and avoiding babysitting their grandkids too much, instead of slaughtering masses of henchpeople.

We just accept that protagonists like this work for organisations that, I dunno, aren’t the bad guys but I really have no sense that an organisation of hired killers that are hired to kill people have the moral compass necessary to not devolve into barbarism. In fact, honestly, we accept too much with little reason. There is something essentially fascist about this kind of thinking. We accept when crims kill other bad crims under the rubric that it’s the trash taking out the worse trash, but that’s convenient for us, there’s no moral trolley problem to wrestle with.

But it is lazy, and it’s lazy of us to accept these premises unthinkingly. All the same, damn, it’s not really the kind of flick which makes you question your ethical framework – you just wonder who’s going to win in the end, and who’s going to end up holding their knife aloft, triumphant.

The second that innocents are threatened, as in, people outside of their peculiar world, the killer threatening to kill them is then the bad guy, and the killer wanting to protect them is obviously the good guy with the knife, which I’m told is the only way to stop bad guys.

In contrast to Hornclaw’s aged tactics and needing to put a blanket over her knees at times when other people feel quite warm, there is the young buck recently brought into the organisation, given the unlikely or poorly translated name Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol) who is clearly unimpressed when others speak of the legend in hushed tones. At first we think his brashness is just the ignorance / confidence of youth, and he just sees a husk of an old woman now. But we’re the ones who see her run up hill at speed (in ways I’ve never been able to do at any age) and kill motherfuckers dead with her bare hands, so we assume he’s mistaken about her washed-upped-ness.

The essential question of who triumphs in the end is dependent on whether you think it matters which killers in a crew of killers triumph over the others. I don’t know if such a dichotomy exists in South Korean society, but I guess the simplistic assumption would be that younger viewers want the young guy to win, not only because he’s young, but because old people suck, and he has ‘good cause’, perhaps. Whereas older viewers want the elder assassin to win and give those young whippersnappers what-for, despite the fact that she’s been brutally killing people, some who deserved it, many who probably didn’t, for about 40 years.

Something for everybody. I distinctly remember the moment when I thought “well, even if this was overly melodramatic and drawn out, at least it didn’t degenerate into a John Wick like slaughterfest for no good reason” and then the very John Wick slaughterfest began as the flick’s final set piece before the showdown with her youthful nemesis. And then my thoughts were “damn, I had useless thoughts too soon.”

She kills, and I’m a bit hazy on the details of who all those faceless henchmen were in the end at that abandoned facility, about a thousand people in the film’s climax, swinging on ropes and shooting them effortlessly like she’s an avenging angel of death / bug exterminator, and well, sure, the stunt people do a lot of solid work. And then there’s the final showdown, as the flashbacks finally bring us up to speed, and we are meant to be thinking “No! Stop! Don’t do it! You two should be looking after each other, not butchering each other!”

But it’s too late. When you’re the most accomplished killer in a murder organisation, and there’s a young person who infiltrates your murder organisation to kill you for personal reasons, then someone has to die in the end, if not the whole murder organisation. So there can be no forgiveness, no reconciliation in the end, can there?

I can’t say that I really enjoyed this flick, but I did watch it all, from beginning to end. I know I’m describing it in sarcastic ways, and some of that arises from my discomfort with the tonal issues I had with it. It tries hard at times to be taken seriously as an actual drama, as if it’s the first time that a film has been made where a hardened killer softens a little bit because they’re catching feelings for an abandoned dog / child / veterinarian / nice bit of furniture, and not something we’ve seen thousands of times before. But what kind of simplistic audience is going to buy that here? The question for other audience members would be whether they care about the serious, dramatic aspects of such a film, or whether they’re mentally biding their time until the killings start up again, or until the endless flashbacks end. The music / score makes you think you’re watching a documentary about some serious stuff, like Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, or North Korea’s genocide of North Korea’s people, but this is an action flick, a fantasy (thankfully) at best.

I guess I didn’t really care about any of the characters, because on the most part they were so thinly drawn and expressed very little dialogue-wise or style-wise to make an impression, and I guess I lost a lot through translation. It doesn’t help that I couldn’t stop thinking that the main antagonist looked like he’d escaped from a K-Pop boy band that he really needed to get back to before they discovered him missing.

I’ve certainly seen better. Even better in terms of violent South Korean flicks about ambivalent killers and endless hordes of crims who need killing. But that was long ago.

6 times this ain’t no A Bittersweet Life, that’s for sure out of 10

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“You can’t beat me. You’ve got something to protect, and I have nothing to lose.” – there’s always, always, always more to lose - The Old Woman with the Knife