The Old Woman with the Knife

The main character in The Old Woman with the Knife is sometimes called Godmother, sometimes Nails, and sometimes Hornclaw. Played by the 62-year-old Lee Hye-young, she appears at first glance to be a gentle-looking woman with silver hair, dressed in stylish grays like a cool grandmother. But beneath her appearance, designed to avoid drawing attention, she carries a poison-tipped dagger that she uses on her targets. An adaptation of Gu Byeong-mo’s 2022 novel of the same name, the South Korean movie follows Hornclaw as she works for a mysterious agency that defends marginalized groups and victims exploited by criminals. However, given that she’s 65 and experiencing tremors, her enemies question whether she’s the same assassin who once took down some 28 bad guys in a single encounter, solidifying Hornclaw’s don’t-fuck-with-her reputation. This sets into motion an elaborate, actionized narrative involving a series of double-crosses, bloody encounters, and criminal maneuvers that prove entertaining, regardless of how familiar it all seems.  

Directed by Min Kyu-dong, the movie cannot be called original or even particularly innovative, but it has a lot of energy and heart. Here’s another in a long line of action movies about a secret underworld of assassins. Storytellers today seem to be obsessed with this idea, if the ongoing John Wick series is any indication. Hornclaw remains the baddest of these killers, having spent decades working for a small group devoted to “eradicating malignant vermin.” The movie has a pronounced empathy for the overlooked and forgotten members of society—senior citizens, stray dogs, drug addicts, and victims of sexual assault. When one of them is wronged, the offenders are labeled “pests” and “insects” to be stomped out. And Hornclaw’s strange and unexplained company makes it right, often in an inconspicuous if bloody way. But she, too, is becoming one of the marginalized. Veteran actor Lee plays her character with great physicality, leaning into her outwardly thin, almost frail appearance before striking with unexpected agility and violence. It’s a terrific performance, and her face carries the emotional scars of someone who has seen the worst of humanity, yet it’s not hardened beyond hope. 

More than once in the screenplay, written by the director and Kim Dong-wan, characters compare older people to various discarded objects—a dull knife that no longer cuts, a wrinkled peach that no one wants to eat, and a scrappy old dog that Hornclaw finds and begrudgingly adopts. It’s her Save the Cat! moment that tells us, no matter how many people Hornclaw slaughters, she has enough empathy for a scruffy old dog, dubbed Braveheart by the vet (Yeon Woo-jin), who saves the dog and Hornclaw. Min and editor Jeong Ji-eun deploy a structure that occasionally shifts to flashbacks, layering Hornclaw, who initially seems like a remorseless killer with a dramatic backstory. A scene set in 1975 finds the young Hornclaw (Shin Si-ah) homeless and wandering in the snow. A couple who run an Americana diner called Club Paradise rescue her. There, after she fends off a rape attempt by an American soldier, the restaurant owner Ryu (Kim Mu-yeol) assures her that she has done nothing wrong by killing the man, and he soon welcomes Hornclaw into their secret world of “pest-control,” training her to be an exterminator.

What struck me was that, despite brutally killing the dregs of society—seemingly to make the world a better place—Hornclaw and the company have been active for the better part of half a century. You would think the criminal underworld would have gotten the message by now: behave, or Hornclaw will get you. But several other criminal factions still operate, prompting Hornclaw’s boss to enlist help from another, younger enforcer. His name is Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), and he thinks that Hornclaw should retire. He’s also incredibly sadistic. When tasked with acquiring a ring from a target’s finger, Bullfight instead returns with the finger knuckle fragments from two hands that he displays in a wooden box. Eventually, The Old Woman with the Knife reveals a series of links between its characters. Everyone’s vaguely related or interconnected through their past associations, giving the eventual confrontation between Hornclaw and Bullfight surprising emotional depth. But I’ll leave those discoveries to you. 

The film’s novelistic structure leaps back and forth through time without signaling the change, sometimes creating momentary chronological confusion along the way. But the story’s web of interpersonal connections among assassins, the people who train and employ them, and the people who earn their wrath is at once all-too-common and well-crafted. Min directs energetic action scenes, often with Hornclaw facing a posse of anonymous goons, which cinematographer Lee Jae-woo shoots with clarity, kineticism, and a predominantly gray color palette. Despite elaborate, high-flying sequences like the one during the climax, I never felt like The Old Woman with the Knife was an action movie first. The story and dramatic turns between Hornclaw and Bullfight took precedence, which is more than can be said for other criminal underworld movies of this ilk. Usually, it’s enough that they offer wall-to-wall action. Here, I was more concerned with how Hornclaw would resolve the open wounds of her past and present.

(Note: This review was selected by Patreon subscribers in a poll.)