The Old Woman with the Knife (Min Kyudong, 2025)
Look, I’m only human. You tell me there’s a movie where a woman plays a professional killer, and I’m in. I love Girls with Guns movies, from the certified classics starring the classy stars like Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock to the early 90s underground of Moon Lee and Oshima Yukari. I love the 70s Kaji Meiko Ladies Snowblood, Female Prisoner Scorpions, and Stray Cat Rocks. I love the 21st century revivals of the genre, from Corey Yuen’s So Close to the iQIYI films of Raquel and MIYA. I’ll watch them all. Netflix was churning them out for awhile, the good (Kate), the bad (Gunpowder Milkshake), the I didn’t bother to finish it (The Old Guard). Sometimes, one of these movies will turn out to be incredible, a series that defines a decade, like Baby Assassins. Sometimes, I’ll forget I ever watched it. I had high hopes for The Old Woman with a Knife. Because I like movies about women who kill for a living. Because I like long titles that say exactly what the thing they’re titling is about. Because it stars Lee Hyeyoung, who I’ve liked very much in a handful of recent Hong Sangsoo films (In Front of Your Face, The Novelist's Film, A Traveler's Needs). I assumed that a movie with this premise, and that title, starring an actress of this calibre, would have a sense of humor, of self-awareness about the genre it belongs to, its inherent absurdity and potent satirical potential. I was wrong.
The Old Woman with the Knife is a bluntly literal film about an old woman with a knife. Lee plays “Hornclaw” (not her real name) a legendary assassin who works for a murder-for-hire business. Her company is ostensibly morally and politically focused: they only kill people who deserve (in their estimation) to be killed. People who they refer to as “bugs”. But times are hard. The founder of the company, who recruited Hornclaw as a runaway teen after she killed an American soldier who attempt to rape and murder her, is long dead (she got revenge for him by swiftly murdering thirty or so members of the gang who killed him) and the current boss is running things more like a business than a vehicle for ideological retribution. But mostly she’s just getting old.
At least, she is when she’s not fighting. One of the dissonances of the film is that in the non-fight scenes, Lee looks and moves exactly as you’d expect from a person her age (she’ll be 63 this year). But of course, the actress is extensively doubled for the fights, and the choreography doesn’t really seem designed to allow for the fact that she’s so advanced in age. She moves too fast and she’s too acrobatic, which is compounded by the hectic camera and editing style director Min Kyudong adopts for the fight scenes. We’ve seen this kind of thing a lot in recent years, as martial arts stars, for reasons of box office draw or personal vanity, refuse to succumb to the realities of time. Donnie Yen, for example, in this year’s The Prosecutor, has himself doubled to hide the fact that he’s playing a character who should be at least 20 years younger than the actor playing him. Really it’s only Sammo Hung (of course) who has managed to convincingly choreograph and perform age-appropriate fights (in his My Beloved Bodyguard).
Lee does excel in the non-fight scene portions of the film, especially floating around in the background of shots, dressed in an overcoat with a cap pulled low over her eyes, like if Kaji's Sasori tossed aside her big black sombrero as she got older and adopted a gray tweed bucket hat. Here too though she is let down by the scenario. Where in the Baby Assassins series, the idea of assassination as job, with all its bureaucratic necessities and co-worker interactions is played as satire on corporate culture and its (in?)compatibility with slacker ideology (or lack thereof), or in the John Wick series, where the world itself is reimagined as a thin veneer beneath which lies a vast and ancient society of rules and obligations regulating the murder of other humans, The Old Woman with the Knife sees its profession as a righteous cause, corrupted by capitalism. This is confused by the central conflict of the film, which involves Lee squaring off against a hot shot young killer who lacks her moral convictions, but who shares an unknown (but unsurprising) connection to her past.
If the assassination company in The Old Woman with the Knife is roughly analogous to a computer start-up (fixing “bugs”; filling a role that society didn’t know it needed, or rather, creating such a role and then exploiting it), beginning with pure intentions (“Don’t Be Evil”) then slowly becoming corrupted by the profit motive, then the conclusion we’re left with by movie’s end is simply that the business will be OK, as long as it retains a kind of human connection. Hornclaw creates a monster by prioritizing work over people; and the company’s downfall, and most of the plot, is precipitated by her forming a relationship with a civilian and his family. In the end, she’s returned her agency to its original mission: the killing of people she considers ethically unworthy of life. The lesson is that tech companies can be reformed by reinvigorating their relationship to the public, by rediscovering their humanity. In other words, I guess, they need to give up on AI.