Han Jun-hee, the D.P. director who calls playing it safe the real risk

Han Jun-hee

Photo: SJ / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 1, 1984 South Korea
Occupation	Film and television director
Known for	Coin Locker Girl, Hit-and-Run Squad
Awards	Baeksang Award

At a masterclass in Busan last month, Han Jun-hee summed up his working method in a sentence most directors would keep to themselves: “If you are trying to be safe all the time, that itself is a risk.” He was talking about D.P., the Netflix series about military police who hunt down army deserters, a subject no Korean director had touched and one he still calls gloomy. The show made a whole country argue about what goes on inside its barracks. Its director has spent the years since doing something less obvious than repeating it.

That instinct runs back to the start. Han came up through Korean genre cinema the slow way, with a short film called To Bite a Cigarette, crew jobs on other people’s sets, including a stint in the directing department of the melodrama BA:BO, and screenplays for other filmmakers before anyone paid for a feature of his own. He told the Busan audience that what he wanted from the beginning was “a story nobody had done before,” and then laughed at the second half of the wish: he also wanted people to watch it.

His script for the psychic thriller The Gifted Hands reached cinemas in 2013, the same year he wrote and directed the small feature Understanding Movies. The real calling card came in 2015 with Coin Locker Girl, a neo-noir about a baby left in a coin locker at a Seoul train station who grows up to be the debt collector of a loan-shark ring in Incheon’s Chinatown. Han built the film around two women, Kim Hye-soo as the boss known only as Mother and Kim Go-eun as the girl she grooms, at a moment when Korean crime cinema was almost entirely a men’s club. The film was selected for International Critics’ Week at Cannes, and the following year it won him Best New Director in film at the Baeksang Arts Awards.

The second feature was the harder lesson. Hit-and-Run Squad, released in early 2019, put Gong Hyo-jin, Ryu Jun-yeol and Jo Jung-suk into a police action comedy about the unit that chases hit-and-run drivers. It opened just before the Lunar New Year holiday, the slot Korean studios save for their safest bets. It sold roughly 1.8 million tickets, far below what that cast was expected to draw, and the English-language Korean film site HanCinema wrote it up as “the curious failure.” The business daily Chosun Biz credited the fresh subject and faulted the polish. It is the one work in his filmography that looks like an attempt to play it safe, and it is the one that did not land.

Two years later he went in the opposite direction. D.P., which premiered on Netflix in August 2021, adapted Kim Bo-tong’s webtoon, itself drawn from Kim’s own military service, and Han co-wrote the scripts with him. Jung Hae-in played a quiet private assigned to track deserters and Koo Kyo-hwan the chatty corporal who partners him. Each case led back to the same thing: young conscripts beaten, humiliated and pushed until they ran. The six episodes became a reference point in South Korea, where military service is compulsory for men and nearly every family has a story from the barracks.

The reaction was not all applause, and the way it split says a lot about the series. The Defense Ministry insisted that army life had changed a great deal since the period in which the show is set, around 2014. Defense Minister Suh Wook went further than his spokesmen, telling lawmakers the series gave the military fresh momentum to look for blind spots. Han never presented D.P. as a documentary, and that is precisely where the argument sat: a drama was being asked to prove a statistic. The awards were similarly mixed for him personally. At the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2022 the series won Best Drama and Koo took Best New Actor, while Han, nominated for best television director, lost to Hwang Dong-hyuk of Squid Game.

A second season of six episodes followed in July 2023, with each episode built as a different genre exercise. By then Han had started doing something unusual for a director with a hit: giving his projects away. On Weak Hero Class 1, the high-school bullying series released in 2022, he served as creative director and left the camera to Yoo Su-min. “I thought when it came to the essence, an emerging director would do a better job,” he said in Busan. Netflix credits him as creator of the second season, and he helped adapt the screenplay of Pilot, the 2024 comedy directed by Kim Han-gyul. In 2023 he sat on the New Currents jury at the Busan International Film Festival.

The pattern holds in his newest release. Dead-End Job, a horror-fantasy series about a part-time job that pays far too well, arrived on Netflix on October 30, 2026, with Han as creator and Kim Da-min, the writer of A Killer Paradox, directing a series for the first time. Lee Jae-wook and Go Min-si lead its eight episodes.

The project he has kept for himself is The Blue Road, an eight-episode Korea-Japan co-production he directs from scripts written with Cho Yu-jin, adapted from Blue Road, a comic co-produced in Korea and Japan. A mutilated body turns up in Tokyo with a message written in Korean, then another in Korea with one in Japanese, and two detectives are forced onto the same case: Son Suk-ku, who also appeared in D.P., as Seoul detective Kim Seok, and Eita Nagayama as his Tokyo counterpart, Inose. The story is set in 2002, the year the two countries co-hosted the World Cup and, as Han pointed out, the year he was about to finish high school. Three episodes screened in the On Screen section in Busan in October, where What’s on Netflix wrote that “on paper it’s a show that shouldn’t work.” Han has his own account of the shoot: “The Koreans work fast; the Japanese are very meticulous.”

The Blue Road premieres on Netflix on November 20, 2026. It is the first time since D.P. that Han has taken the director’s chair on a series, and it is a story he says he had been carrying for a long time. The risk he described in Busan is now his own again.

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Tags: Dead-End Job, Son Suk-ku, Han Jun-hee, Coin Locker Girl, D.P., Kim Go-eun

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