Rating: NR | Runtime: 125 minutes
Release Date: April 30th, 2025 (South Korea) / May 16th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Well Go USA Entertainment
Director(s): Kyu-dong Min
Writer(s): Kyu-dong Min & Kim Dong-wan / Gu Byeong-mo (novel)

Don’t shoot a butterfly with a gun.

We first meet Hornclaw (Shin Si-ah) half frozen and covered in snow on the side of the road in 1975. If not for Ryu (Kim Mu-yeol) stopping to save her, she’d be dead at sixteen. But that’s what he does, taking her to the restaurant he and his wife own to thaw her out and offer a job. They can’t afford to pay a salary, but they can give her a place to stay and food to eat. And, eventually, a vocation unlike any she could have imagined.

Fast-forward to present-day and Hornclaw (Lee Hye-yeong) is now in her sixties—an aging assassin revered as “Godmother” by her peers. The respect they’ve held for her, however, has recently begun to wane. Not because she hasn’t remained a formidable force despite her declining health, but because she still holds true to the code of rules Ryu instilled all those years ago. Whereas the new guard sees their occupation as a means for profit, she maintains the ethos that they kill “insects” to save the world. They laugh because she still refuses to let emotions cloud her judgement. She scoffs because they always let politics cloud theirs.

Kyu-dong Min’s The Old Woman with the Knife (co-adapted with Kim Dong-wan from author Gu Byeong-mo’s novel) isn’t your usual origin tale. Yes, we meet her as a teenager and witness her first kill before going back every now and then for added context, but that origin takes a backseat to the rebirth that this film actual depicts. Those flashbacks are but a means to show us why Hornclaw became who she became and why she’s yet to retire. It’s her current actions that reveal whether she’ll accept that the job has finally passed her by or teach her co-workers that they’ve gone too far astray for her not to intervene.

It’s also the origin story of the character that ultimately pushes Hornclaw to make this decision: Kim Sung-cheol’s Bullfight. Because he’s not just the new psychopath on the beat holding a mirror up to what he believes is her own hypocrisy once she chooses to protect a potential witness (Yeon Woo-jin’s Dr. Kang) instead of dispatching him like her own rules demand. He’s also a figure from her past looking to balance a scale he believes has been tipped against him. Bullfight’s actions are thus very personal and, as a result, playfully cruel since it’s not solely a matter of payback. He needs her to remember what she did.

It seems like way too much for one feature-length script coming in at just above two hours, but Min and Kim do well to distill it down and ensure everything folds into each other. We must know Hornclaw’s past with Ryu to understand her tenuous place in the present. We must know her emotional connection to Kang to understand Bullfight’s rage. And we must learn Bullfight’s past to understand how these two killers are the same except for the fact that Ryu still had enough heart to save her when they met while Hornclaw’s had already died before meeting him.

The underlying message is therefore one that asks us to question the sustainability and success of being a cold-blooded killer. Yes, it allows Hornclaw the ability to charge into suicide-level situations with the confidence to finish the job and ensure no evidence ties her to the crime, but it also runs counter to Ryu’s mission of killing for “good.” If you aren’t willing to open yourself up to protecting an innocent person who’s guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, how do you stop yourself from becoming the exact sort of “insect” you’ve prided yourself on exterminating?

That’s the conundrum that makes The Old Woman with the Knife so compelling. It’s not about whether Hornclaw lives to fight (or not fight) another day. It’s about whether she’ll find the strength to refocus the mission. It’s about discovering whether Bullfight’s unforgiving plan to destroy her will push her further away or shake her awake to stop the slide apathy introduced. Real-life people who are good at a job so often get promoted to managerial positions they’re ill-equipped to handle that it’s refreshing when someone like Hornclaw is actually perfectly suited to guide a team precisely because of her job experience. Here’s someone who doesn’t want to lead but must to protect their objective.

Beyond a full-blown one-woman-against-a-team-of-mercenaries climactic encounter leading to the inevitable showdown between Hornclaw and Bullfight, the action is mostly quiet and covert. These are operatives hired to do a job who are smart enough to do so without getting caught … unless their guilt gets in the way. So, it’s mainly cat-and-mouse chases, precise hits, and close shaves—either intentional via a conscious desire to not choose violence or unintentional via elaborate games meant to turn the pursuer into the pursued. It’s new blood (Bullfight and young Hornclaw) plowing through and old blood (old Hornclaw) holding on despite the punishment from being a step too slow.

Lee Hye-yeong plays the latter perfectly with her smarts just barely proving enough to overcome her newfound physical liabilities. She’s a bad ass struggling with the fact her desire to reclaim purpose comes into conflict with the legend that’s kept her in power. Outsiders see it as weakness (much like she and Ryu did after an unspeakable tragedy), but it’s really her greatest strength. That indelible part of her that allows someone like Kang to know in his heart that she’s a “good person” regardless of his correct assumptions about her occupation. It’s also why Kim Sung-cheol’s Bullfight is so interesting. This supposed “lapse” is what supplies him his opening, but it’s also what he wished for from her decades ago.

Those intricate connections are what makes Min’s film great. It’s not action loosely tied together by a generic plot. It’s a captivating narrative augmented by its action. That’s the difference between telling a story about killers and one about people who just so happen to be killers. Their humanity (or lack thereof) is what drives them and the act of not killing becomes just as important as the act of killing in process. Not because Hornclaw’s salvation is tied to getting out of the life, but because it’s tied to remembering why she got into it in the first place.

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Lee Hye-yeong in THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE; courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment.