Name: The Assassin(s)
Director: Hur Jin-ho
Genre: Drama, Crime, Thriller, Action
Released: 2026-09-23T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 131 min
Cast: Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il, Lee Min-ho, Choi Yu-ri, Ryu Hye-young

A veteran detective watches a shooting he was never meant to witness. A city-desk editor files copy that never reaches print. A rookie reporter keeps pressing the one question his superiors have already closed. The Assassin(s), the new film from Hur Jin-ho, builds its tension not around who pulled the trigger but around the machinery that decides what a country is allowed to know about it.

That contest over the record is the film’s real subject. Hur stages the aftermath of the killing as a struggle between the men trying to reconstruct what happened and the institutions with a stake in a version already agreed upon. Evidence goes missing, witnesses are warned off, front pages are remade overnight. None of it is shouted; the suppression accumulates as procedure, a chain of small administrative choices that add up to a lie. The effect is less whodunit than anatomy — a close reading of how an official account is assembled, sealed and then defended, while the few people who saw something inconvenient are quietly moved to the edge of the frame.

The casting makes the argument out loud. Yoo Hae-jin, one of Korean cinema’s most trusted everyman leads, plays Detective Park Cheol-gu as dogged rather than heroic; his ordinariness is the point, a working man who cannot let a lie stand. Park Hae-il, all coiled restraint, takes the city editor Kim Jae-hwan and turns him into the film’s conscience about a press being leaned on. And Lee Min-ho, long associated with glossy television romance, is cast firmly against type as the rookie reporter Han Young-il, the youngest, greenest and least protected figure in the newsroom. Three registers of stubbornness, all aimed at the same wall, let the film distribute its moral weight rather than resting it on a single hero.

For Hur Jin-ho, the film reads as a deliberate pivot. He built his name on restrained melodrama — the quiet devastation of Christmas in August, the slow ache of One Fine Spring Day — where feeling rather than plot carried the weight. The Assassin(s) channels that same control into a political procedural, trading longing for institutional dread. The instinct for understatement survives the genre change: critics out of Toronto described a film that grows steadily more forceful as it runs, tightening into an argument rather than erupting into one, and closing on a jolt that lands harder for the restraint before it.

The frame is a real wound in South Korean memory. On Liberation Day in 1974, a gunman opened fire during a presidential address at Seoul’s National Theater; President Park Chung-hee was unhurt, but his wife, first lady Yuk Young-soo, was struck and later died. The official account named Mun Se-gwang, a Korea-born resident of Japan, as an operative acting on North Korean instruction, and he was executed before the year was out. Hur’s film spends less energy restaging the shooting than interrogating everything that surrounded it — the questions foreclosed, the reporting spiked, the doubts a nervous state preferred to leave unspoken.

What emerges is as much a film about journalism as about murder. The newsroom scenes carry the picture’s moral charge, following professionals who keep working the story after they have been told, more than once, to drop it. In interviews around its premiere, Park Hae-il framed the role as a defense of integrity and a free press, and the finished film wears that conviction openly, building toward an indictment of state deception rather than a tidy solution. That it reaches screens amid a renewed argument over media independence gives the period setting an unmistakable present tense.

It is worth being clear about what the film is and is not. The Assassin(s) is a dramatization, not an exposé: it stages suspicion without producing new evidence, and the historical record still attributes the killing to Mun. The “who was really behind it” framing is a dramatic engine, not a fresh finding, and viewers hoping for a solved case will leave without one. Reviewers who caught it in Toronto also flagged a dense screenplay that folds in more subplots and supporting players than even its long runtime can fully carry, with the plotting straining at times to keep every thread legible. Its force is emotional and civic rather than forensic.

A night scene from Hur Jin-ho 2026 Korean thriller The Assassins — A scene from Hur Jin-ho thriller The Assassins, 2026

Around the central trio, the ensemble includes Choi Yu-ri, Ryu Hye-young, Kim Dae-myung, Bae Sung-woo and Park Ji-hwan. The screenplay is credited to Kwon Gi-jun and Lee Ji-min, and the film is produced by Hive Media Corp, the outfit behind a run of glossy Korean commercial thrillers. It runs 131 minutes and sits in a drama-crime-thriller register, propelled by the kind of tight editing that carried it through its festival screenings.

The Assassin(s) had its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16, 2026, before opening in South Korean theaters on September 23, 2026, slotted into the fiercely contested Chuseok holiday corridor where Korea’s biggest releases collide. No theatrical dates have been confirmed yet for the United States, Spain, Mexico or Brazil; for now, audiences outside Korea will have to follow it along the festival trail.