Phantom

Everyone’s a cat and everyone’s a mouse in Lee Hae-young’s action spy semi-thriller.

Based on Mai Jia’s 2007 novel Feng Sheng, Phantom is set during the Japanese colonisation of Korea, in 1933. After a failed attempt on the life of a Japanese General, five people suspected of being the traitorous Phantom are locked in a rural hotel and interrogated. Our hero is Park Cha-kyung (Lee Ha-nee) a young woman we know to be this traitor, working for an anti-Japanese shadow organisation. Her fellow suspecrts are Baek-ho (Kim Dong-hee), a young communications employee, Gye-hang (Seo Hyung-woo), an expect code cracker, Yuriko (Park So-dam), the secretary to the General, and Murayama (Sol Kyung-gu), a half-Korean Japanese police officer who was demoted and deposed from his position.

There’s a lot going on here, and I like that the film doesn’t mess around with any mystery, at least in terms of who the titular spy is. Instead, it spends its first half showing us how the characters interact, how they know each other, and just how much they actually trust one another. After all, there’s always the possibility of there being a second phantom. I said first half, because then things take a bit of a turn. Phantom is the story of two very, very different (and mercifully short) films questionably jammed together to make a 130-minute monstrosity that doesn’t work at all.

It’s a shame because the film it starts life out as isn’t actually half bad. Following Cha-kyung from the start of the film, knowing she’s the (or a) Phantom, into the hotel where she must navigate finding allies and traitors before it’s too late is quite riveting. Why it chooses to become this bonkers action b-movie midway through is a baffling choice, and one that really doesn’t work in its favour at all.

The action scenes are cool, I’ll give them that. If the entire experience had been set up for these John Wick shenanigans, maybe I’d have enjoyed them more, because there is some pretty fun (if not particularly believable) gun choreography. Sure, character stuff goes completely out the window during this half of the movie, but who cares? Oh, right. You spent an entire hour being told that these character motivations were important.

The biggest sinner here is Murayama, who is never completely a friend or foe during his stay at the hotel. He clearly has an agenda and wants nothing more than to be a ranking officer again, but his turn to extreme villainy is almost laughable when not twenty minutes prior Sol Kyung-gu was playing the character with some introspection, subtly and even charm. There was already a crazy evil Japanese guy, Takahara (Park Hae-soo), who filled the role perfectly well.

Phantom is such a frustrating mess of a film. It’s got some excellent production design, and the thriller elements from the beginning are pretty great when they want to be. It’s just so odd, and so disappointing, that its second half becomes so cartoonish and dumb; which is somehow turned even dumber and more cartoonish when the epilogue comes up and sees our two leads as gun-toting trilby-wearing assassins looking that time The Mask made a Tommy gun out of balloons.

I didn’t hate it, and if you’re open to it (and not taken by complete surprise like I was), you might even enjoy it. Like I said, it looks really nice and the acting is superb. Everyone is going all-out here, and having a blast. Take your mind off it, and you might have one too.

Verdict: Far sillier than it promises, Phantom ends up being very hard to take seriously, but maybe that’s what it intended all along.

Overall entertainment: 5/10
Violence: 8/10
Sex: 1/10
MVP: Surprisingly, Yuriko
Clothing of choice: Yamamura’s leather jacket

Phantom (2023)
Also known as: 유령
Korean, Japanese

Director: Lee Hae-young
Writers: Mai Jia(novel), Lee Hae-young

CAST

Sol Kyung-gu – Murayama Junji
Lee Hanee – Park Cha-kyung
Park So-dam – Yuriko
Park Hae-soo – Takahara Kaito
Seo Hyun-woo – Cheon Gye-jang
Kim Dong-hee – Baek-Ho
Esom – Nan-yeong