Given a title like The Old Woman with the Knife, viewers will likely enter expecting to see an old woman killing people with a knife. And indeed, an aging Lee Hye-young does a whole lot of that as Hornclaw (her cheesy and adopted nickname) in Min Kyu-dong’s latest film. She even kills a few people with guns, too. The premise adapts Gu Byeong-mo’s novel and is no more complicated than the title of both works: an assassin is aging out of the game. Her agency targets the “pests” and “insects” of society, removing them from the equation without due process: sleazy men, abusive dads, negligent and corrosive caregivers, corrupt executives. The rogue enforcers operate totally beyond a network of accountability; even a paramilitary justice-enforcing group would face more oversight. Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a younger killer with a spotty and cheap connection to one of her past extermination jobs, complicates things when he is assigned to babysit her on a job.
None of Hornclaw’s assassinations in the film manage to rival one of her first, when the unassuming elderly woman she appears to be surreptitiously brings a misogynistic assailant to justice on the subway with an economic poisonous stab. It’s the kind of kill an old woman would be reasonably capable of: modest, calculated, and unobtrusive. Who would ever expect the sexagenarian? Unfortunately, this is also the only kill Hornclaw approaches this way. It’s also the most interesting projection of what aging in this profession would look like. The rest of the time, she takes out most of her targets like an immortally young assassin: with brute force, quick strikes, and in one-on-one (or one-on-twenty) melee combat. Lee Hye-young may have been born the same year as Tom Cruise, but she plays a character who ages; she looks and moves 62 in a way that Ethan Hunt does not. The obvious stunt double used to maintain a facade of movement-heavy fight choreography doesn’t help hide the fact that she runs like the older woman she is.
For all their effort to hide age in the action, the filmmakers take the opposite approach to the symbolism. Hornclaw adopts an aging stray dog after the veterinarian tells her the dog is so old that the shelter will struggle to place it in a home. Her television plays Charlie Chaplin instead of YouTube. A grocer sells her old fruit with bruises that nobody else wants, promising they taste even better than the unblemished and prettier fruits. “Do not forget this is an old woman,” seems to be the point of the not-so-subtle symbolism. And that nobody wants her anymore.
Flashbacks from her bloody past interrupt the present at random. Some of it is traumatic, and very little of it has any purpose beyond pure exposition, always revealing itself at the exact moment (or after) that helps to make emotional sense of the present. Why does Bullfight look at her like he knows her? Cue a flashback connecting the two. How come everyone talks about “Godmother” as if she were some legendary super-soldier? Enter an expository flashback of her going full John Wick to avenge her mentor figure and original handler. These choppy flashbacks only distract from the already disappointing action, while also failing in their bid to add earnest emotion.
For all of its many shortcomings, The Old Woman with the Knife does still deliver plenty of fun kills, all of which feature Hornclaw penetrating the body of her victims with an assortment of sharp objects: an ice pick-esque contraption, the claw of a hammer, a fireplace poker, and, of course, her knife. Perhaps there is something inherently Freudian in the action of a woman penetrating a man to death, but little hints at any worthwhile sexual readings of her preferred mode of violence. The first life she takes gets the closest to any psychoanalytic thesis about her killing method. When she is young and played by Shin Si-ah, Hornclaw (then called Nails) defends herself from an American soldier stationed in Korea who makes an unwelcome advance and then snaps and hits her when she resists his rape attempt. She stabs him straight through his thick jarhead with a long metal poker. But this is only the beginning, and in her profession not all of her victims are sexual offenders. Which is to say, The Old Woman with the Knife isn’t just another Promising Young Woman. Her method of dispatchment just looks cool, and she knows it.
DIRECTOR: Min Kyu-dong; CAST: Lee Hye-young, Shin Sia, Kim Sung-cheol, Yeon Woo-jin; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: May 16; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 11 min.
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