Korean Movie Night: Time to Hunt 사냥의 시간 (2020) Korean

Lee Je Hoon, Ahn Jae Hong, Choi Woo Shik, Park Jung Min, Park Hae Soo

Movie rating: 7/10     Neck score: A

I didn't really read up on what the movie was about before I started it, which might have actually been a good thing for me, because I was all the more surprised when it started the twists. It's a bit dystopian, or apocalyptic, meaning it's after a big financial crash, and small time thief Jun Seok (Lee Je Hoon) gets out of prison in a completely different Korea. So what does he do? Plans a heist with his besties. Yay. Good idea boys. Well, it's more of an armed robbery. This isn't a time for fancy heist gadgets, this is bust in and shoot up times. A dystopian heist. But instead of robbing a bank or whatever, they get the gangsters who own the local gambling den mad at them. Gangsters who then hire a super deadly and crazy assassin to kill them. An assassin with a passion for hunting his prey.


This movie isn't scary so much as anxiety inducing. It does the suspense and high stress really well. We felt hunted as we were watching. It does that through awesome lighting and perspective. Music of course helped. But really, it was how they established the characters. You have the group of boys who are pulling off the heist. They are super relatable because they are driven by their desires to get out of the slums, and they are clearly just boys (I mean, that selca with their guns, so dumb, haha). They are terrified when it actually comes to even pulling off the crime. And then they establish the scariness of the hunter so perfectly that even if he's just standing there, you're terrified of him. Park Hae Soo did such a good job being terrifying. Is this my cutie muffin, Kim Jae Hyuk? He's like a panther, or some other cool, big cat hunter. It's definitely a very high stakes cat and mouse game for him, and he's definitely the cat, being super calm, chill, even sweet seeming, until he pounces and rips you apart. It was wonderful. I didn't know whether to be scared of him or in awe of how cool he was.

So yes, there is action, there is anxiety, and also just really cool aesthetic of gritty dystopia type world. I loved the lighting and how much they said with the visuals, implications etc. It wasn't overly gory for all that (although there definitely was some shocking gore), since a lot of it was hinted at rather than shown as well. That was part of the terror. It definitely earned it's thriller genre, and was enjoyable, but I also had to be constantly expressing how anxious I felt during it to relieve my stress. It was a good thing I watched with Curdy and Lizabreff via facetime so I could express my distress and anxiety. It helped keep it light. I probably would have suffered more, had I watched alone.