The Old Woman with the Knife — Min Kyu-dong [Review]

Given a title like The Old Woman with the Knife, viewers will likely enter expecting to see an old woman killing people with a knife. And indeed, an aging Lee Hye-young does a whole lot of that as Hornclaw (her cheesy and adopted nickname) in Min Kyu-dong’s latest film. She even kills a few people with guns, too. The premise adapts Gu Byeong-mo’s novel and is no more complicated than the title of both works: an assassin is aging out of the game. Her agency targets the “pests” and “insects” of society, removing them from the equation without due process: sleazy men, abusive dads, negligent and corrosive caregivers, corrupt executives. The rogue enforcers operate totally beyond a network of accountability; even a paramilitary justice-enforcing group would face more oversight. Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a younger killer with a spotty and cheap connection to one of her past extermination jobs, complicates things when he is assigned to babysit her on a job.

None of Hornclaw’s assassinations in the film manage to rival one of her first, when the unassuming elderly woman she appears to be surreptitiously brings a misogynistic assailant to justice on the subway with an economic poisonous stab. It’s the kind of kill an old woman would be reasonably capable of: modest, calculated, and unobtrusive. Who would ever expect the sexagenarian? Unfortunately, this is also the only kill Hornclaw approaches this way.

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