HUNT

The real-life political scheming and scattergun extra-judicial executions that followed the 1979 assassination of the South Korean president form the background to Hunt, the startingly assured directorial debut by Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae. Hunt’s plot is so convoluted, with all the players embroiled in endemic corruption and brutality - meaning that there are no good guys here – that some critics declared it impossible to follow. That hardly matters: it is the stylish car chases, ferocious fights and interrogations under torture that propel us through this relentlessly tense, wildly kinetic thriller. Central to the action is the search for a mole in the upper reaches of the KCIA, codenamed Donglim, whose intel has led to an ambush killing dozens of agents and a messily bungled attempt to extract a defector. When it seems an insider is planning to kill the new president, there is nobody left to trust.