A former news anchor Yoon Young-hwa (Ha Jung-woo, The Berlin File), demoted due to a personal scandal, now runs a daytime talk radio show. Deeply unhappy and divorced from his TV journalist wife (Kim So-jin), Yoon contemptuously tells off a particularly onerous caller, who then calls back to announce that he will blow up a section of the Mapo Bridge over the Han River. When the bridge actually explodes, and the terrorist promises to call back, Yoon is inspired to go “live” with an interview with him. Meanwhile he quickly cuts a deal with his superior (Lee Kyeong-yeong, Venus Talk) to have him reinstated if the “live program” leads to the angry culprit’s on-air confession and arrest. However, he soon finds out to his terror that the “crazy caller” is more than a few steps ahead of him.
The Terror LIVE opened domestically in July 2013 to stiff competition against Pacific Rim, Man of Steel and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer but managed to amass a very respectable figure of 5.58 million tickets nationwide, ranking as the ninth biggest box office hit of the year, just behind Hide and Seek.
Once we decide not to question the wild implausibility of its terrorist’s near-omnipresent power, the film works rather well, sometimes beautifully. Writer-director Kim Byung-woo wisely confines the setting to one recording studio, later turned into a makeshift war room for the broadcasting company, and keeps Ha Jung-woo front and center for most of the movie’s screen time. Ha rises to the challenge by essaying a complex character with believably self-contradictory traits, at once arrogant, ruthless and compassionate. It is also encouraging to see a Korean film so good at calmly manipulating its viewers to generate maximum suspense, rather than subjecting them to mock-cathartic (as opposed to genuinely emotional) explosions of undeserving sentiment. The cunning, reptilian efficacy of Kim’s direction, especially in the first half, is its greatest asset.
Indeed, The Terror LIVE, like Cold Eyes, perhaps 2013’s most underappreciated Korean film, hints at a new orientation in Korean genre cinema: an increasing emphasis given to adult professionals devoted to doing their jobs. Such attention to professionalism allows the movie to “get right” the kind of details that appear miserably or laughably fake in most other Korean genre efforts. Thus we have an entirely credible female government agent (played with impressive level-headedness by Jeon Hye-jin, All for Love) and a brisk yet loaded exchange between Yoon and his ex-wife that never once breaks from the mold of two journalists reporting on a potentially life-threatening situation.
Visually the film makes efficient use out of broadcasting cameras, cell phones and other bits of found footage, but it is most impressive in terms of its deceptively complex editing (supervised by Kim Chang-joo, The Face Reader) and sound design (headed by Jeong Jin-wook, The Yellow Sea). The spectacle of the final CGI explosions, on the other hand, are not altogether convincing. Still, The Terror LIVE is well worth your time as an ingenious, taut thriller, and as a snap-shot commentary on Korean left-wing annoyance at the conservative turn of Korean government in the last decade and a half.
Kyu Hyun Kim