Review of The Villainess / 악녀, directed by Jung Byung-il

I remember when I first moved back from South Korea, as a high schooler who had been studying abroad at the time, I was clinging onto everything that would connect me back to the time I’d spent abroad. I really loved Korea, and I still do. It’s why I ended up doing my master’s thesis on the country.

That said, I enrolled in a Korean cinema course at my college because of this love. I’d entered my freshman year at FIT in NYC when I moved back, and then it ended up becoming something that led me to pursue film more seriously in general. The Villainess was a movie that came pretty quickly onto my radar.

I first watched it as a freshman in college, but now I’ve taken the chance to rewatch after all of these years. Maybe it’s because I was thinking about how terrible the movie Carter is, but at the end of the day, this was such a good movie. And guess what? It holds up after all these years.

Let’s get into the review.

Sook-hee/Yeon-soo tries to leave her life as an assassin behind, but the past never lets her forget who she was.

Our main character in this movie is Sook-hee, who is a highly skilled assassin. She’s on her own at the beginning of the movie, and is surrounded by police, sedated, and taken away to the intelligence agency in South Korea. There, they force her to have plastic surgery, fake her death, and give her the name Chae Yeon-soo.

There, Yeon-soo becomes a part of the agency. She learns she was pregnant this entire time, and signs a contact to become an agent for ten years. She gives birth to her daughter, Eun-hye, while training there, and the agency gives her an apartment with her.

Next door lives another agent, Jung Hyun-soo, but Yeon-soo doesn’t know this. The two end up falling for each other, but then he knows what he needs to do, while she has no idea who he really is. She’s sent on a mission to kill the father of a young girl, which is where her past begins to bleed in.

Turns out when she was seven, she saw her father’s death while she hid under the bed. She never saw the killer, but she swears revenge and tries to find and kill him. Years later, she goes after a man named Jang-chun, who tells her he was not the killer, while he sells her to a prostitution ring.

She was rescued by a man named Joong-sang, who then trains her to be an assassin. She ends up marrying him, despite their age gap, but when he sees she’s no longer useful, he stages his own death. She kills a gang that hated him, but turns out he just wanted her to die in the act of revenge. She did not.

After a mission goes wrong, in the present day, Yeon-soo comes under suspicion. The agency suspects she might be a double agent, but Hyun-soo comforts her and they come even closer. The agency then assigns her a job to kill someone from a catering company, and the two are arranged to be fake married.

Yeon-soo discovers her target is Joong-sang, who is alive. She misses the shot and fails to kill him, and he figures out she was the assassin. He then sends her an audio file exposing Hyun-soo as an agent, but when Hyun-soo goes back tot he apartment, Hyun-soo and Eun-hye are killed by Joong-sang.

Yeon-soo rushes home to rescue them from the situation, but watches as both are killed jumping out of the window of the apartment. She later finds an audio recording where Hyun-soo asks his boss if they could get married for real, which sparks her inner rage.

She looks for Joong-sang, killing many of his men. He escapes, but she chases after them, and he reveals he was the one who killed her father all of those years ago. She murders him with an axe, and laughs maniacally as the police surround her and the corpses.

Overall Thoughts

This is such an interesting movie, especially considering how it takes on the revenge story from a woman’s perspective. We don’t get that often, and when we consider this is a Korean movie, that fact becomes even more compelling.

While the plot on this movie can be a little flimsy, I would say it makes up for that fact in the action department. I didn’t think that I was bored at any point throughout the film—it really keeps you on your toes.

The visuals are also pretty good throughout, which shocks me about Carter. I thought Carter was so bad y’all. I wrote my official review as a critic for MovieWeb, but man did I not like that movie.

Go watch this one though if you’re interested and haven’t already.

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