Review of The Age of Shadows / 밀정, directed by Kim Jee-woon

If you’re new here and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I began this website as a way to document everything I was watching and reading as a bit of a digital archive. I used to work professionally as a film critic for three years, so this was a way of also exploring my interests.

I did end up breaking off to do my own thing in the end, and this website has been an unexpected joy of mine. Although I myself am not Korean, Korea always had a soft spot for me. I lived there briefly in high school, continued this blog documenting my Korean film and literature journey, and even did my master’s thesis on colonial Korean women’s literature.

Recently, like so many others, I lost my prospective job. I took a hard look at my finances, and realized I had time to take off. I am so privileged to have this chance, and I decided to focus on my writing career and blog for a bit. Because I had so much free time while I was in this period. By the time this comes out, hopefully I will have a job again, but I’ve created such a backlog of blog posts.

One of the little series I’ve started though is revisiting movies I saw in college and high school. For this post, I’ve come back to the Korean movie The Age of Shadows, which I first saw in college. Back then, I used to go to all of the Korean film events in New York City, and I was invited to a screening of this movie for free.

I took my friend, who fell asleep during the film. I wrote down my thoughts then, which I recently uncovered when I was going through all of my old movie reviews that weren’t published online. I kind of miss the days of writing things by hand, but the digital archive is quite nice.

I went back to this movie in early 2025 (this post will come out much later), and it was such a throwback. It’s been over five years now, which is wild to me!

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know these can get quite long.

In colonial Korea and China, a group of resistance fighters rush to get weapons into their home country.

Our main character in this movie is a Korean police captain: Lee Jung-cheol. But unfortunately for him, he was born during the Korean colonial period, and his work mainly involves doing the whims of the Japanese colonial government. If you don’t know the basics of this time, I recommend doing some basic research on colonial Korea and how awful it was.

Anyways, Jung-cheol has been given orders from the colonial government: he is to snuff out any resistance from the native Koreans, and that includes selling out his own people.

Jung-cheol has no choice but to follow orders, so he takes on these jobs. He becomes known for being a sellout among the local Korean population, but his mental attitude takes a major hit when he knows one of his old classmates is captured, as a resistance fighter, and dies by the Japanese government’s hand.

Suddenly, Jung-cheol might not be as loyal as he was before. And that comes to the attention of the resistance’s leader: Che-san. He knows that Jung-cheol might be a key to breaking down the Japanese defenses, and he decides that Jung-cheol could be a valuable turncoat.

So begins the main plot of this movie. Jung-cheol is sent out onto a train to find a key resistance fighter named Kim Woo-jin. The majority of the movie takes place on this train, which adds to the tension and action in such a good way. Those who know Train to Busan and Snowpiercer will probably know this trick very well, as it’s similar in that sense.

Kim Woo-jin has another reason for being on this train, which departs Shanghai and is heading for Gyeongseong (the colonial name for Seoul). There’s a belief that there are weapons on board the train that will greatly help the rebels, but we don’t know who on the train agrees with the resistance movement or who might be a double agent for the Japanese.

Lots of ethical questions are brought up in this film. I can sense this feeling of nationalism that arises with these types of films from South Korea—lots of movies about heroes and being caught between your country and duty, especially when it comes to the colonial period. I find them quite subtly nationalistic and mildly anti-Japanese at time, which is interesting to observe how these feelings of anger still manifest a century later.

Not diminishing the colonial period at all—I spent most of graduate school studying how it was a cultural genocide attempt. In some ways the Japanese succeeded. But when I watch contemporary movies like these, they kind of have an underlying agenda, which is interesting to watch as an outsider.

Overall Thoughts

I would really describe this movie as a cat and mouse game. I enjoyed that element of it, although I would’ve liked to go deeper into the politics and reality of the period the film in set in. I feel like we don’t get enough sometimes of that in colonial set films, so it’s refreshing to see when it happens.

Gong Yoo and Song Kang-ho are spectacular as always. Lee Byung-hun is a nice surprise in the film as well, although he doesn’t really play a big role in the end. The movie’s pacing could be a little better, although I thought the dialogue was pretty decent for the script. I could see why that friend fell asleep at one point—if you’re not invested, you’re not going to be invested later.

I don’t think I’ll be revisiting this film a third time any time soon. I think two was enough for now, but I’m glad I got to reflect on this movie a second time. It’s worth watching at least once if it’s something that interests you, so I recommend checking it out at least once!

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