The Roundup: Punishment (2024) is the latest installment in The Roundup series, a comic crime thriller centered on Detective Ma Seok-do — a complex figure who is funny, prone to mistakes, sometimes careless yet always gets the job done, direct, and unexpectedly empathetic. His presence alone has drawn over 11 million viewers to theaters.
This time, Ma and his team target the head of an illegal online casino based in a Southeast Asian country, where kidnapped or deceived individuals are forced into labor under the threat of torture and death — a modern form of slavery. In the wake of a recent real-life tragedy involving a Korean man tortured and killed in Cambodia under eerily similar circumstances, a question emerges: does the film treat this crime world fairly and responsibly, alerting audiences to a social reality? Or does it reduce human suffering to mere fodder for comic spectacle?
The Roundup: Punishment opens with a scene where a young man in a tattered white T-shirt and shorts runs barefoot through dimly lit streets, chased by a group of gang members. His face and upper body are smeared with blood and sweat, his breath short and uneven — he seems to be running on the last of his strength. Will he manage to escape? He miraculously encounters a police car. The gang members, only a few meters behind, hesitate to advance. A policeman steps out to assess the situation. Then, a glossy black SUV slides in beside the police car and stops. The boss of the illegal casino steps out swiftly, shooting both the officer and the young man dead.
The film bleeds into reality when news breaks of a Korean man killed under similar circumstances — as if the unseen footage of his death were completed by the film’s fictional image. Reports suggest that hundreds of young Koreans are being held captive by crime syndicates in Cambodia, forced into online scams such as cryptocurrency and romance frauds. They are lured by Korean brokers under false promises of lucrative overseas jobs, only to be coerced into criminal labor upon arrival. To win release, they must pay a hefty ransom or risk a lethal escape attempt.
This represents a dire underside of globalization, where mobility, employment, and even crime transcend national borders. It is striking that the film identified this criminal trend before it gained widespread media attention. Yet it is also troubling: if the film had worked to direct the public’s attention toward this hidden violence, perhaps things might have turned out differently for the victim.
Saving Private Ryan
Films such as Philadelphia (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Brokeback Mountain (2005) have contributed greatly to raising awareness and reshaping public perceptions of social issues such as AIDS, the atrocities of war and the sanctity of humanity, mental health, and homosexuality. Even Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) engaged with society by challenging Hollywood’s long-standing tendency to prioritize “white stories” and “white characters” over racial and ethnic diversity. It is always significant when a film speaks to and about society — though how that happens is far from simple.
The resonance of Philadelphia, for instance, was made possible through a network of film criticism, media, academia, and awards circuits that worked as springboards for one another, generating a sustained social discourse on AIDS and prejudice. When connected to other institutions, films can exert powerful influence over public conversation. Through such connections, cinema acquires the status of a medium that not only represents but mediates social reality. This applies not only to films grounded in realism but also to those belonging to other genres. A comic or hybrid film can likewise refresh public perception.
Parasite (2019) is Korea’s most recent example of this phenomenon — a work that sparked international conversations on poverty, class polarization, and the ethics of wealth distribution within capitalism. It is undoubtedly a high-quality film, but also a fusion of genres — thriller, satire, and comedy. Yet despite its hybridity, it served as a conduit for serious social reflection, particularly through its circulation across global networks of criticism, academia, media, and awards.
The Loss of Connection
The inability of The Roundup: Punishment to engage with social issues reflects a broader reality: the network that once connected films to neighboring institutions has grown tenuous. Film criticism no longer holds the influence it once did, and public interest in critical discourse has faded. Today, the primary standard for evaluating a film is its box office performance. The obsession with audience numbers has suffocated other dimensions of cinema. The question of how many millions watched has drowned out voices that might discuss the film’s diverse meanings and implications.
Mainstream media does little to challenge this trend; instead, it amplifies it. Academia, too, has lost confidence in leading such conversations. Fewer universities now offer courses in critical film and media theory, and even fewer scholars occupy visible positions in public debate. Films alone, however powerful, cannot generate social discourse in the absence of these supportive frameworks. Without criticism, media engagement, or academic dialogue, cinema risks becoming a closed circuit of consumption — detached from the social realities it depicts.
Prejudice Creeps into the Void
Prejudice finds its way into the void left by the absence of coordination among film-related institutions. More precisely, films lose the chance to look at themselves in the mirror when the chamber of discussion — once composed of critics, scholars, and journalists — falls silent. In the years leading up to The Roundup: Punishment, several Korean films displayed a fixation on certain stereotypes of Southeast Asia and its people. Deliver Us From Evil (2020) and The Golden Holiday (2020) are among those that reinforced a familiar set of assumptions about the region.
In Deliver Us From Evil, a pre-op transgender character, Yu-i, embodies Thailand’s popular image as a destination for sex-change operations. She assists the main character, In-nam, in searching for his kidnapped daughter. Thailand, however, is portrayed as a place riddled with serious crimes such as human trafficking and plagued by the absence of law and order — an unfair and unfounded generalization. Yet these exaggerated portrayals serve the film’s aesthetic purposes, lending it a darker atmosphere and a heightened sense of danger that strengthen its noirish appeal.
This kind of prejudicial portrayal of certain places and peoples enters the cinematic language unchecked when there is no robust conversation about what cinema is and what cinema can do. The Roundup: Punishment arrived in theaters, offered millions of viewers two hours of entertainment, and then quietly slipped away. Ma Dong-seok, who plays Detective Ma Seok-do — a figure of almost superhero-like physical power — once again captured the audience’s affection. His near-mythic strength, capable of crushing gang bosses with one or two blows, delivers an uncomplicated catharsis. It is thrilling to watch him punish the criminals responsible for the young man’s death in the opening scene. Yet the film’s message does not move an inch beyond this vicarious pleasure of moral retribution.
Epilogue: Cinema without Echo
The Roundup: Punishment stands as both a success and a symptom. It confirms the vitality of popular Korean cinema — its ability to attract millions, to entertain, and to channel collective desires for justice — yet it also exposes the silence surrounding that vitality. When a film that brushes so closely against real violence fails to stir broader reflection, the problem lies not only in the film itself but in the ecosystem that receives it. Without the echo of criticism, media engagement, or academic interpretation, cinema becomes a self-contained spectacle: it acts, dazzles, and disappears. The social role of Korean cinema, once defined by its capacity to translate lived realities into shared conversations, risks dissolving into numbers and noise. What remains to be seen is whether future films can recover that lost resonance — not by speaking louder, but by inviting society to listen again.