‘Harbin’: Toronto Review

Dir: Woo Min-ho. South Korea. 2024. 108mins

The refined pleasure of director Woo Min-ho’s gripping historical spy drama Harbin lies in its painstaking craft. Evocative lighting and detailed period recreation frame the year 1909, four years after the Eulsa Treaty turned the country into a colony of Japan. Lt General Ahn Jung-geun (Hyun Bin) and the Independence Army are working to restore Korea’s statehood, which they hope to achieve by assassinating Japanese Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi. This seeming suicide mission is rendered more fraught by the presence of a mole in the group, and by the pursuit of the bloodthirsty Japanese Captain Mori Tatsuo (Park Hoon). 

The action is beautifully composed

Having previously directed investigative thrillers like Spies and Inside Men, Woo is comfortable combining efforts with co-writer Kim Kyoung-chan to conjure intrigue. The presence of Hyun Bin, one of South Korea’s biggest stars who made his name in the popular period piece The Fatal Attraction and the fierce actioner Confidential Assignment, will give the film a ready-made audience. Harbin premiered in Toronto boasting strong star power, an intense narrative and tightly choreographed set pieces – all of which should help it garner some commercial interest.

Much of Harbin’s drama originates in the uncommon honor of Ahn. As the film opens, he is trudging his way over a frozen river before crashing into a meeting held by his Independence Army comrades. Tired and breathless, he must explain to them why he’s not a traitor. Forty days previously, Ahn led the Independence Army to a rousing victory over the Japanese troops but, rather than execute the POWs, he let Captain Mori and other Japanese soldiers go free. They regrouped and slaughtered Ahn’s remaining men, leaving Ahn as the lone survivor.

To redeem himself and save the movement, Ahn hatches a plan to smuggle himself and some comrades into Russia to assassinate Hirobumi. As they begin to form arms with a smuggler named Ms. Gong (Jeon Yeo-been), however, it becomes clear there is a mole in their midst.

While Hyun is excellent as the honorable yet naive Ahn, the actual character is fairly underdeveloped. He is psychologically distant, lacking any interiority. The same could be said of his compatriots, men like Kim Sang-hyun (Jo Woo-jin) and Woo Deok-soon (Park Jeong-min). Both are too basic to push the complex mechanisations required for a back-stabbing subplot to wholly take hold. Still, the actual plotting, tightly wound by screenwriters Kim and Woo, performs enough pleasing shifts to stoke the film’s tension. 

What Harbin lacks in memorable characters, it more than makes up for in its staging and craft. The action is beautifully composed, with set pieces that jump from woodland to desert and urban settings. The opening battle sequence in a snowy forest is vicious, slowed to poetic speed: faces are shoved in mud, heads are sawn off and men desperately wander in a daze for the next kill.

Another thrilling set piece involves a brawl in a claustrophobic train carriage that has so much vigour, it’s often returned to throughout the film in flashback. DoP Hong Kyeong-pyo delicately switches aesthetics, alternating between brutal spectacle, shadow-soaked noir-stained interiors, and black and white flashbacks that intimate the no man’s land of loyalty in this war for independence.