Directorial debuts tend to arrive in one of a few guises. There are the conceptual ones: assembled from their makers’ ideas and interests, prone to sloppiness and instability. There are the simple ones: character-focused crowd-pleasers, stylistically banal, generally forgettable. And there are the disciplic ones: careful, studied, artistically solid but highly derivative. Typically, the last thing you expect from a first-time filmmaker is the kind of tight, slick, accomplished genre piece more often assigned to veteran directors or handled by major studio machines. And yet this is exactly what Lee Jung-jae delivers in Hunt, not only his first feature directorial credit but his first directorial credit period.
Lee’s firm handle on his movie’s many constituent parts is evident from the very start. A spy thriller set in the 1980s, it opens with an extended suspense/action sequence that, save a subsequent time jump, effectively continues barreling through Hunt right up to its final moments. In these first few scenes, though, Lee establishes his prowess as a director with modest clarity, serving the material rather than marking his artistic territory. Cutting between various sources of intrigue and tension, he displays an understanding of how to gradually ratchet up intensity, how to juggle several perspectives within a single scene, how to use space, motion and sound to choreograph action and how to ensure that none of the above interferes with plot and character.
There’s a lot on his plate, then, a lot that he handles with aplomb. Set in the South Korean security agency at a time of substantial political unrest in the country, Hunt’s two central figures are the heads of rival departments, each probing the other to find a mole which all believe must exist, though none can be sure it actually does. Occasionally skipping between timelines, often swerving between temporary protagonists and fueled by a chaotic sense of universal distrust, it’s a fast-paced movie that’s perhaps too narratively complex for such a simple concept but screenwriter Jo Seung-Hee is capable in the art of obfuscation. He knows what to withhold, what to reveal and when to do it, though reportedly this was not always the case (the public release is a re-edited version after complaints of confusion from its Cannes première in May prompted reshoots).
So it’s not sloppy nor instable, not banal nor forgettable, not derivative. It’s taut, clear, lively action-thriller filmmaking, albeit lacking in inspiration. One feels that Lee set out to craft a strong, respectable piece of work, not to dazzle with his creative genius; one feels that, overall, he succeeded. And this is no mean feat for someone so inexperienced in the director’s chair ― the wide array of demands on primary crew members with relatively high-budgeted genre titles like this have seen many better-versed filmmakers come a cropper many times before. Yet Hunt isn’t quite the wholly satisfactory movie it promises to be, at least for the first half. What happens to spoil the movie somewhat is less of a twist than it is an unexpected turn, one that Jo’s screenplay goes on to develop in admirable detail, rather than simply throwing it in for shock value. He’s aided by some slightly heavy-handed wrong-footing from Lee beforehand, though it’s in Hunt’s later stretches that the wrongness really begins to take hold.
For this isn’t just a spy thriller ― it’s a political spy thriller and one that’s considerably surer on the thrills than on the politics. When you opt to solve a complicated web of character motivations, ethics, ideological drives and narrative concerns stretching back decades by replacing it with another such web, you’ll have to find a solution for this one too, and it’s here that Hunt fails. It’s less that the movie descends into nonsensical explosions and melodramatic shootouts (though it does that too), more that the implications of certain characters’ actions in the closing stretches betray both the movie’s political integrity and those characters’ plausibility. I’m all for suspending disbelief in the name of good cinema but Hunt suspends disbelief at the cost of good cinema, sullying a hitherto decent picture.
And yet a movie is, of course, so much more than just how it ends. There’s at least a good 90 minutes of consistently engrossing entertainment in here, 90 minutes whose impact lingers longer in the memory than what ensues. And even then, Hunt never goes completely off the rails, maintaining both the promise of more quality filmmaking to come throughout and the eventual delivery of it. That’s a nice thing to note in anyone’s hands; in the hands of a first-time director, it’s really something to savor.
Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
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