[HanCinema's Film Review] "Escape"

Gyoo-nam (played by Lee Je-hoon) is a North Korean soldier who dreams of defecting to the South. Why Gyoo-nam wants to defect so badly is a bit of a mystery. Much like "My Name Is Loh Kiwan" from earlier this year, "Escape" just takes it for granted that everyone must want to defect from North Korea, so why bother wasting time discussing the exact reasons? Gyoo-nam does, finally, almost give an explanation in the climax. Apparently, it's because he wants the freedom to fail.

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There's some context for what this means, although not a lot. The villain of "Escape" is Hyeon-sang (played by Koo Kyo-hwan) who wanted to be a concert pianist, and might have had a gay relationship with some other North Korean concert pianist, Woo-min (played by Song Kang) who's currently in Russia living his dream, I think. Apparently, for some reason, Hyeon-sang had to become a major in the State Security Department and marry a woman not appearing in this movie.

"Escape" does have some female characters, at least- most of them are just part of this group of bandits that's engaged in a guerrilla war with the North Korean military. Again, North Korea is bad, so the screenplay doesn't feel any need to explain why this conflict exists. I might have forgotten that they were in the story at all except that Esom plays one of the unnamed women, and she's always a pleasure to watch even in a questionable project like this.

South Korean depictions of North Korea are in a weird place right now. Thanks to films like "Parasite" and TV shows like "Squid Game" the main chic aspect of South Korean culture is that it's terrible. But in like, a cool way, because the same capitalism that causes all the problems in the story also allows the texts themselves to criticize itself. Hence how Gyoo-nam is motivated, not by a belief that South Korea is actually good so much as the belief that he can at least choose to do whatever he wants to do there and fail.

Did you know that South Korea also has mandatory military service, harsh punishments for desertion and social consequences for moving outside your prescribed lane for career goals? Obviously people in South Korea itself know this, so all "Escape" can really do in regard to its North Korean villains is make them do all these things in a meaner way. The text also uses such archaic stereotypes about North Korea that until a cell phone pops up at the halfway point I didn't even know what decade the story was supposed to be taking place in.

But even if I set aside all the questionable political elements of the story, the bigger problem "Escape" has is that its villains just aren't credible. For a bunch of authoritarians, the State Security Department is both remarkably bad when it comes to verifying paperwork as well as being very lousy shots. So much for the nuanced South Korean films about North Korea we had in the 2010's- that era's pretty decisively over, it seems.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Escape" is directed by Lee Jong-pil, and features Lee Je-hoon, Koo Kyo-hwan, Hong Xa-bin, Song Kang, Esom, Lee Ho-jung. Release date in Korea: 2024/07/03.