[HanCinema's Film Review] "Project Silence"

As of this writing, "Project Silence" has earned 686,704 admissions at the South Korean box office. As hard as it may be to imagine from that paltry total, "Project Silence" had actually been one of the more hotly anticipated films of the summer season. The high profile disaster film stars Lee Sun-kyun as Jeong-won, a major political operative who ends up in the middle of an infrastructure disaster in the form of a collapsing bridge. Oh, and also a bunch of murderous assassin dogs have escaped and are seeking revenge.

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If all of that sounded perfectly sensible right until the murderous assassin dogs showed up out of nowhere, well, that's a pretty close approximation of how I reacted to the movie. And I suspect most South Korean filmgoers felt the same. "Train to Busan" ended up being a major milestone in South Korean film history because trains and zombies are a surprisingly complementary combination. Bridge disasters and murderous assassin dogs? Not uh, not so much.

I have trouble believing that "Project Silence" was originally premised around the murderous assassin dogs. Other recent South Korean titles are just infrastructure disaster flicks with political overtones. Like "Tunnel" from 2016 or "Exit - Movie" from 2019. Infrastructure disasters are pretty scary and dangerous without needing to throw murderous assassin dogs in there. There was already a collapsing bridge and a toxic gas leak. What do the murderous assassin dogs really add?

Well, mostly, they provide a remarkably clumsy political metaphor. See, Jeong-won works for Hyeon-baek (played by Kim Tae-woo), and the murderous assassin dogs were a government project. I can't help but feel like this is a disturbingly prescient metaphor for just how pathetic South Korean political discourse has gotten. In a country this dysfunctional, normal incompetence isn't good enough, the really bad guys have to do stuff like fund murderous assassin dog programs to be convincingly evil.

There are, I should note, human characters in this movie. They're just not terribly interesting. Jeong-won's daughter is pondering whether to study overseas. There's some drama about a professional golf player and her expired passport and an older couple with dementia subplot. Ju Ji-hoon appears as Joe Park, a tow truck driver who's somewhat unpleasant. There isn't anything more to any of these characters than these very simple descriptions. The dogs somehow get more human characterization and are even treated sympathetically despite the fact the script is already forcing them to be the villains for no good reason.

"Project Silence" had been delayed due to Lee Sun-kyun's suicide. This certainly cast a pall over the production, although I'm not sure there's any circumstance where this movie could have had a successful release, just because the whole premise is so incredibly silly. "The Land of Happiness" is coming out next week, and will probably be a more worthy successor to the title of his final project if only because "Project Silence" sets the bar for that so low.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Project Silence" is directed by Kim Tae-gon, and features Lee Sun-kyun, Ju Ji-hoon, Kim Hee-won, Moon Sung-keun, Ye Soo-jung, Kim Tae-woo. Release date in Korea: 2024/07/12.