Uprising, the Korean Netflix epic that turns a master and his slave into enemies at war

Kim Sang-man’s 2024 film, co-written and produced by Park Chan-wook, sets two men raised in the same house against each other during the Japanese invasions of Joseon, and builds its war story on the question of who owns whom.

Uprising (Jeon, Ran in Korean) is a South Korean historical war film directed by Kim Sang-man, written by Shin Cheol and Park Chan-wook, and starring Gang Dong-won, Park Jeong-min, Cha Seung-won, Kim Shin-rok, Jin Seon-kyu and Jung Sung-il. It had its world premiere as the opening film of the 29th Busan International Film Festival on October 2, 2024, and arrived on Netflix, which produced it as an original, nine days later, on October 11.

A slave, a master and a war

The story starts before the war, in a Joseon kingdom where the idea that all people are born equal is treated as treason. Its first scene is the execution of a scholar who preached exactly that, and King Seonjo, played by Cha Seung-won, makes it clear that such talk among commoners and the enslaved will not be tolerated.

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Cheon-yeong, born into slavery, is then sold into the household of the kingdom’s highest military official to serve as companion, and stand-in for punishments, to the family’s son, Jong-ryeo. Cheon-yeong keeps trying to run away. The two boys become friends anyway, across a line that neither of them drew and that both of them are expected to respect.

Years later, the Japanese invasion of 1592 throws the country into chaos. As the king and his court abandon the capital, the people left behind turn on their rulers, and the royal palace goes up in flames. Jong-ryeo, now one of Seonjo’s closest military officers, escapes with the monarch. His wife and child die in the fire, and he comes to believe, wrongly, that Cheon-yeong is responsible.

From there the film splits its two leads. Gang Dong-won’s Cheon-yeong, carrying his former master’s sword, joins one of the righteous armies, the volunteer militias that fought the invaders while the regular army collapsed, and becomes something of a folk hero; Kim Shin-rok plays the militia fighter Beom-dong and Jin Seon-kyu the militia leader Kim Ja-ryeong. Park Jeong-min’s Jong-ryeo stays at the king’s side with a vow of revenge. The war that should make the two men allies against the Japanese vanguard commander Genshin, played by Jung Sung-il, brings them back face to face as enemies.

The history under the fiction

The invasions are documented history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s armies landed in Korea in 1592 and again in 1597, in the seven-year conflict Koreans call the Imjin War, and the Joseon court’s flight north from Hanseong, today’s Seoul, is one of the most studied episodes of the period. The Joseon chronicles record that, as the court fled, crowds set fire to the palaces and to the government offices that held the registers of enslaved people. That fire is the seed of the uprising in the title.

The opening execution has a historical anchor too. The cast list includes Jeong Yeo-rip, the 16th-century scholar whose circle was crushed in a treason purge in 1589, three years before the invasion, and whose talk of a grand unity among people is the heresy the film puts in the mouth of its condemned man. Seonjo is the king who presided over both the purge and the flight from the capital.

The protagonists, however, are invented. Cheon-yeong and Jong-ryeo are fictional characters, and the film uses them to put Joseon’s class system at the centre of a war story: an enslaved man who fights for a country that still counts him as property, and a nobleman who serves a king who left his own capital to burn.

The Korean title, 전,란, takes a single word for the havoc of war and splits it with a comma into its two characters, war and disorder. The film was first announced in English as War and Revolt before Netflix settled on Uprising.

A Park Chan-wook script in Kim Sang-man’s hands

The project began as a Park Chan-wook screenplay. In June 2023 Park said he had been writing it for a long time and had finished it in 2019, with Shin Cheol as co-writer. That same month Netflix confirmed the film and its cast. Because Park was busy shooting the HBO series The Sympathizer, the direction went to Kim Sang-man, and the film was produced by Park’s company Moho Film together with Semicolon Studio.

Kim Sang-man is an old Park collaborator. He started in film designing posters, then became an art director on If the Sun Rises in the West (1998), Happy End (1999) and Park’s Joint Security Area (2000), and on Bloody Tie (2006), where he also handled the music. He moved into directing with the crime caper Girl Scout (2008), followed by the thriller Midnight FM (2010) and The Tenor – Lirico Spinto (2014), a biopic of the tenor Bae Jae-chul.

Uprising was his first feature in ten years and by far his largest canvas: a 126-minute period war film built around sword fights and battles, a long way from the radio-studio thriller of Midnight FM. The score is by Jo Yeong-wook, the composer behind Park’s Oldboy and Decision to Leave, and the cinematography by Ju Sung-rim.

A cast of familiar faces

Gang Dong-won has a long history with period action. He played the title role in the fantasy Jeon Woo-chi: The Taoist Wizard (2009) and an illegitimate nobleman’s son in Yoon Jong-bin’s Kundo: Age of the Rampant (2014), set in 19th-century Joseon. In Uprising the class position flips: this time he is the slave, not the aristocrat. In between he made Peninsula (2020) and Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Korean film Broker (2022).

Park Jeong-min broke through in Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet (2016), playing a cousin of the poet Yun Dong-ju under Japanese rule, and before Uprising he had appeared in Netflix’s Hellbound and the crime film Smugglers (2023). Kim Shin-rok, also from Hellbound, is known for Beyond Evil and Reborn Rich. Jung Sung-il became an international face through Netflix’s The Glory, and Cha Seung-won had already played Seonjo’s son, the future king Gwanghae, in the historical drama Hwajeong.

Awards and a festival first

The film did well in Korea’s 2025 awards season. At the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards it won Best Screenplay for Shin Cheol and Park Chan-wook, Best New Actor in film for Jung Sung-il and a technical award for Jo Yeong-wook’s score, and it was nominated for Best Film. Park Jeong-min won Best Supporting Actor at the Buil Film Awards, and Lee Na-kyum won Best Art Direction at the 46th Blue Dragon Film Awards.

Its premiere made festival history as well. Uprising was the first streaming production chosen to open the Busan International Film Festival, Asia’s largest film festival, a choice that drew criticism from parts of the Korean film industry.

Before pressing play

Uprising carries an adults-only rating in Korea, and the coverage around its release singled out the amount of sword violence, beheadings included. It is not a family film. It remains available on Netflix, where it has been since its October 2024 release.

On paper, Uprising brings together a Park Chan-wook script about class, a director trained in production design and two of Korea’s most popular actors, and its awards went to its writing, music, art direction and its villain. The friendship between Cheon-yeong and Jong-ryeo is the hinge of the whole film; whether that bond carries the weight of the war around it is the question each viewer will settle for themselves.

Tags: Netflix, South Korea

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