The Villainess (2017)

Jung Byung-gil's The Villainess arrives with a katana, a body count, and no interest in explaining itself. A seven-year-old girl watches her father die, is sold into a prostitution ring, is rescued by a hitman, is trained into a killing machine, is widowed, is recruited by the National Intelligence Service, is given a new face and a new name, bears a child, and eventually settles several scores with an axe. The plot functions as a delivery system for choreography, and the film is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

The women here are lethal, and the agency's chief, Kwon-sook, runs her operatives with a coldness that makes the men look sentimental. There is a real charge in watching a mother and an assassin inhabit the same body, and the film never stops to congratulate itself for noticing. The cast is Korean because the film is Korean, not because a spreadsheet demanded it. Beyond that, the ledger sits empty. No subplot bends toward the same sex. No villain is a corporation. No character pauses to explain the environment, the patriarchy, or the correct way to feel about one's own body.

Mostly the film screams, stabs, and drives a shuttle bus through a parking garage. It is a propulsive, nearly wordless machine, and whatever social consciousness it carries rides in the trunk instead of climbing onto the roof with a megaphone. We have endured many films that wish to instruct us. This is not one of them. It wants to hurt people beautifully, and it does.