REVIEW: Harbin (2024) dir. Woo Min-ho

Harbin opens icy cold with a bird’s eye view long shot of a broken soldier (Hyun Bin), in body and spirit, traversing the frozen Tumen River that divides the Korean Peninsula from Russia and China. The soldier, Ahn Jung-geun, is traveling from Japanese captivity back to his camp of Korean resistance fighters as the cold of the river surrounds and swallows him entirely. He looks so small before the mass of water with its grand, almost mythic, geometric spirals and swirls. The tundra is impossibly perfect to the point that it must be computer generated, though if the location exists anywhere in the world it might as well be in Latvia where Harbin was shot and co-produced. The opening also foreshadows the scale of the task ahead of Ahn and his co-patriots: to assassinate their colonizer and the Prime Minister of Japan, Itō Hirobumi (Lily Franky).

There’s very little actual action in Harbin, much like the director’s own Man Standing Next, but the compositions are so layered and well-composed that it’s never a slog. Most of the runtime circles around tables and train cars with the resistance fighters plotting, re-plotting after new hurdles appear, and discerning who amongst them can really be trusted and who may actually be a turncloak. They first suspect Ahn because of his time away (prone to selling out during Japanese torture) and because his refusal to kill POWs results in the slaughter of the men under his command (with him triumphing as the lone, suspicious survivor). For Ahn, the goal isn’t to kill as many Japanese as possible but to kill Itō Hirobumi and secure independence for Korea and wasting meaningless rounds on captured soldiers won’t move national independence an inch closer.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.