The lead character in Min Kyu-dong’s gratuitously violent Pagwa (The Old Woman with the Knife) doesn’t operate the same way as most other action figures.
First and foremost she’s female and, as advertised, she’s a genuine senior rather than a mere over-the-hill ingénue. Also, true to her billing the South Korean hit-woman known as Hornclaw—played as an adult by 63-year-old Lee Hye-yeong—prefers cold steel cutting and stabbing to torrents of lead. The one cliched characteristic Hornclaw shares with, say, Michael Fassbender’s ice-cold death dealer in David Fincher’s The Killer (2023), is that she has her reasons.
It was she who long ago was left alone to wander barefoot through a snowstorm as an orphaned schoolgirl. She who was adopted as a dishwasher in a hamburger joint, was sexually assaulted by an American soldier, grew up and graduated to the role of sworn avenger of women and girls brutalized by a parade of goonish male bullies. Hornclaw’s original weapon of choice: a long, thin, icepick-like knife. Many, many blades of all sizes come into the picture in Hornclaw’s mission to rid the world of “pests.”
The plot does not march through time in a straight line. As cooked up by author Gu Byeong-mo, screenwriter Kim Dong-wan and director Min, rather late in life Hornclaw makes the acquaintance of a bolshy young guy named Bullfight (actor Kim Sung-cheol). Bullfight’s singular achievement is slaying a gang of crooks whose racket is to forcibly harvest human organs. In that respect, Bullfight and Hornclaw have something in common—they both dispense street justice to people with bad manners.
Such a simple folk tale does not waste its time with irony. Hornclaw belongs to a sort of “vengeance agency” for aggrieved clients. The agency, including the renegade Bullfight, is dedicated to wreaking death and destruction on the type of miscreants who would kidnap a harmless veterinarian’s young daughter for immoral purposes.
Don’t worry too much about connecting the dots. What exactly do the movie’s various villains do to deserve being killed? That depends. Who gives the orders? We never really find out. Hornclaw and Bullfight make their bloody way through a forest of guilty foes like a firestorm mowing down trees.
Occasionally we observe Hornclaw pausing to contemplate her chaotic life, as if to make sense of it. Sullenly, she pays attention to happy families, aware that she can never again fit that mold. A trace of regretfulness passes over the old woman’s face—that’s actor Lee’s brief opportunity to do some old-fashioned acting before going back to the Korean guignol at hand. Hornclaw kills almost out of habit. Afterward she indulges in a bit of awkward reflection—“I’m not a good person”—or some hard-earned words of advice—“Hold tight onto your grudge.”
The Old Woman with the Knife is never a “good” arthouse-style foreign film, tugging our heartstrings with moments of pathos or well-justified comeuppance. The bitter old woman and the brash young sword-punk ping-pong from scrape to scrape in their own hectic sphere, rarely philosophizing and even more rarely taking a coffee break. Admirers of ultraviolent Asian action contraptions like director Gareth Evans’ Indonesian-made orgy-of-combat series the Raid pics will find moments to appreciate.
The impossible stunts are impossible to miss. Any real human being would be dead after this kind of shellacking. An evil intruder posing as a housekeeper kills young Bullfight’s abusive—what else?—father. Hornclaw beats a bully on a subway train. A bad guy eats a container of wriggling worms. Hornclaw, the consummate outsider, just doesn’t have time for holding hands and bravely carrying on into a cloudy future.
The Old Woman with the Knife is a confusing onrush of energy, like life itself. Filmmaker Min Kyu-dong, whose previous features have veered unsteadily from marital dramas to horror shockeroos, must have been out of his mind to put a senior citizen through such an ordeal. But the audience will remember it.
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In theaters
