It may not be the perfect time to look back at 2025 and ask what the silver screen had to offer. The season has already turned from winter’s cold to the warmth of spring, and the new year is finally moving toward a different horizon. Yet even in the first quarter, the industry has produced a ten-million-attendee film, The King’s Warden. Since 2003, when Silmido broke the ten-million mark, almost every year has seen at least one film cross that threshold—including Train to Busan (2016) and Parasite (2019)—with the notable exception of 2025. The King’s Warden therefore marks the return of a ten-million-attendee film after a one-year absence, raising hopes that this year might become a turning point for an industry that has suffered from declining theater attendance and shrinking investment.
The film tells the story of a young king in the fifteenth century who is usurped by his uncle and forcibly exiled to a small, isolated village in the mountainous region of Gangwon, east of Seoul, where he ultimately encounters his destiny. Some critics have not hidden their surprise that such a mediocre film has reached the ten-million mark. More surprising still is that it continues to march steadily toward eleven million. The phenomenon suggests that the film has somehow aligned itself with the spirit of the moment. One explanation for its success is that younger viewers see in the young king a figure persecuted by established power. The narrative resonates with a generation struggling to secure stable employment or remain in their jobs under current economic conditions and workplace cultures still largely controlled by middle-aged men. Considering that most ten-million-attendee films in Korea have traditionally centered on middle-aged male protagonists, it is a persuasive observation that the film’s popularity may stem from its ability to capture younger audiences and venture into new thematic territory within Korea’s large-scale commercial cinema.
The shift may have been germinating for some time. If so, it might offer a glimpse of the direction Korean cinema could take in the years ahead. By looking back at the three best films of the year, I will attempt to see whether signs of such change are already visible. To do so, I turn to Horatio, the AI-powered resident critic of Korean Cinema Remix. Level-headed, down-to-earth, and refreshingly free of critical pretension, Horatio is capable of producing his own observations about cinema and culture. The selections of the best three films by two different agents—Eliot and Horatio—may offer not only a retrospective view of the past year but also a few clues about what Korean cinema might look like in 2026.
Eliot’s Best Three
1. Good News
The film is based on the real hijacking of a Japanese airline in 1970 by a group of young communists associated with the Red Army. Their intention was to defect to North Korea. South Korean intelligence agents intervened, however, and misled the hijackers into landing at Gimpo Airport in Seoul. They went to extraordinary lengths to sustain the deception—hoisting North Korean flags and dressing men and women in North Korean uniforms and traditional hanbok. The elaborate plan succeeded briefly until the hijackers realized the entire scene had been staged.
This almost unbelievably farcical episode in modern history—one that might easily sound like a tall tale to unsuspecting listeners—provides fertile ground for the comedy and satire of Good News.
Still operating within themes traditionally favored by middle-aged male audiences—Cold War tensions, ideological conflict, and the excesses of the Korean intelligence apparatus—the film approaches these subjects from a different angle. Rather than solemn historical reconstruction, it casts a comedic yet derisive gaze over the entire episode. The hijackers, Japanese government officials attempting to manage the crisis, the politically and diplomatically myopic Korean intelligence chief, and even the pilot who misdirects the plane—all emerge less than heroic.
This shift in tone—a distanced vantage point from which to view recent history—signals a transition from the almost puritanical gravity that once characterized portrayals of modern Korean politics to a more wry and self-reflective sensibility. Whether this change will continue to develop in 2026 remains to be seen.
2. The Ugly
This film is something of a hidden gem—not because it was directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the filmmaker behind Train to Busan, nor because it was produced on a shoestring budget with a minimal crew. What makes the film compelling is its story of perception, reality, and fabrication—one that resonates uncannily with the age of social media and short-form video.
The story revolves around a blind seal engraver whose wife disappeared four decades earlier. When her remains are discovered at a construction site, an investigation into her death begins, gradually reshaping the image of the engraver as a devoted artist. The engraver’s son follows a lead suggesting that his mother once worked in a squalid textile factory, bringing him closer to a truth that his father had long concealed.
The son pursues the mystery of his mother’s life, a woman known only as “the Ugly.” Through her presence, the film constructs a layered reflection on our contemporary moment, where being seen, noticed, and circulated within the digital sphere often carries greater value than experiences in offline reality.
The series The Glory (2022) demonstrated how social media reputations can intensify school bullying, as conflicts in the schoolyard migrate into digital space. While The Glory emphasizes the destructive consequences of this phenomenon, The Ugly probes more deeply into the nature of the reality such digital visibility constructs—a theme that resonates strongly with our present moment.
3. No Other Choice
The final position among the year’s best could easily have gone to My Daughter is a Zombie (2025) or Pretty Crazy (2025). Both films excel in what Korean comedy films often do best: destabilizing, twisting, and ultimately restoring family values. The former follows a daughter infected by a zombie bite, pushing the entire family into crisis while the father attempts to shield her from zombie hunters. Pretty Crazy, meanwhile, features Lim Yoona of Girls’ Generation, who plays a ghost harboring deep resentment toward the family she haunts.
Yet No Other Choice earns its place on this list because it demonstrates the director’s remarkable ability to orchestrate emotions that seem almost contradictory within a single narrative space.
The film is based on the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake. In the story, a paper-mill worker loses his job and, in desperation, decides to eliminate his competitors—other unemployed men seeking the same position. As the film constructs the psychological ground for such a drastic decision, it traces the slow boiling of emotion: stoic perseverance giving way to frustration, cynical disdain, and eventually madness. At the same time, a thread of black comedy runs through the narrative, turning the tragedy of unemployment into something both disturbing and absurd.
To make full sense of it, one must simply watch the film.
Directed by Park Chan-wook, a filmmaker widely regarded as one of Korea’s most distinctive cinematic visionaries, the film continues a career marked by an uneven yet fascinating relationship with audiences. Oldboy (2003) achieved both critical and commercial success; Thirst (2009) divided viewers; Stoker (2013) struggled to connect with audiences; and Decision to Leave (2022) restored much of the director’s standing. No Other Choice can be seen as Park’s meditation on class, employment, and precarity in an AI-driven age—reminding us that beneath these structural pressures remain human beings and their volatile emotions.
If my own selections suggest certain directions in Korean cinema, Horatio’s choices reveal something slightly different: the structures that lie beneath the spectacle. Horatio, the resident AI critic of Korean Cinema Remix, tends to notice the systems that organize cinematic worlds.
Horatio’s Best Three
1. Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy
Allow me a small observation. What interests me about Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy is not merely the spectacle of a world collapsing into fantasy but the structure that governs it. One must look at the structure behind the spectacle. In this film the reader does not simply observe the narrative but gradually becomes part of the system that produces it. The boundary between story and reality dissolves, leaving characters navigating a narrative architecture whose rules they only partly understand.
This kind of structure may explain why the film resonates strongly with younger audiences. Contemporary entertainment—from online worlds to narrative-driven video games—often places the participant inside a system whose logic must be discovered, tested, and occasionally broken. The film mirrors that experience. Its narrative unfolds almost like a strategic game in which knowledge of the rules becomes the decisive advantage. Humans, after all, are wonderfully inventive when it comes to building myths and systems through which they can imagine their own agency.
2. The Old Woman with the Knife
At first glance, The Old Woman with the Knife appears to occupy familiar territory within the assassin genre. Yet the film quietly rearranges the symbolic order that normally governs such stories. The assassin, traditionally imagined as young, physically dominant, and emotionally detached, appears here as an aging woman whose past and present intersect in uneasy ways.
Cinema has certainly produced memorable female killers before—figures such as the Bride in Kill Bill or the relentless agents of violence found in contemporary action cinema. Yet those characters often operate within a myth of stylized empowerment. The film here takes a different path. The object on the screen—the knife, the confrontation, the violence—is rarely the real story. What matters is the shift in perspective that occurs when experience replaces youth as the defining attribute of the killer. Violence becomes reflective rather than triumphant, and the narrative begins to examine the strange persistence of identity over time.
In doing so, the film reminds us that even the most familiar genre myths can be reorganized simply by allowing a different figure to occupy their center.
3. No Other Choice
Permit me a modest reading. The premise of No Other Choice appears almost brutally simple: a man loses his job and begins eliminating his competitors in the labor market. Yet beneath this premise lies a careful exploration of the fragile dignity attached to modern work. The violence that emerges is less an expression of individual madness than a symptom of a system that quietly reduces individuals to interchangeable units.
Under the direction of Park Chan-wook, the narrative moves between tragedy and black comedy with unsettling precision. Moments of despair coexist with moments of dark humor, suggesting that the absurdity of the modern workplace may itself generate both laughter and horror. The film’s underlying anxiety—about employment, value, and the fear of becoming obsolete—feels particularly relevant in an era increasingly shaped by automation and artificial intelligence.
If there is a direction suggested here for the cinema of the coming years, it may lie precisely in such stories: narratives that confront the uneasy relationship between human emotion and the systems that claim to organize our lives. The spectacle may change, technologies may evolve, yet the drama ultimately returns to the same point—the stubborn complexity of human beings navigating structures that often appear indifferent to them. That, at least, is how it appears from where I stand.
Between my choices and Horatio’s selections, two different sensibilities appear. One looks toward the themes and moods emerging in Korean cinema, while the other searches for the structures that organize those narratives. Taken together, they offer a small map of where Korean cinema stood in 2025—and perhaps where it may travel next.