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‘the witch: part 1. the subversion’ (‘manyeo’): film review.

'I Saw the Devil' writer Park Hoon-jung's latest is timely, female-fronted actioner, 'The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion.'

By Elizabeth Kerr

Elizabeth Kerr

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What do you get when you mix a classic Bond villain and some crackpot science into a Korean revenge thriller? You get The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion , an often mesmerizing, occasionally kooky but thoroughly entertaining thriller from Park Hoon-jung. The writer-director probably still best known for penning Kim Jee-woon’s bloody, torture orgy I Saw the Devil reels in the gore here (don’t worry, it’s not totally banished) in order to focus more squarely on the central character’s badass awakening. Park has help in the form of influences ranging from Kick-Ass  to  Hanna and maybe The Man from Nowhere , and even though he relies on a hoary plot device that is well past its best-by date (we use 100% of our brains, full stop), the concoction he’s come up with is just original enough to earn a place in the Korean crime-revenge-thriller canon.

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Warner’s most recent foray into the local market following Kim Jee-woon’s box office hit  The Age of Shadows and debuting director Lee Zoo-young’s under-the-radar critical hit A Single Rider would appear to have all the necessary elements for a strong summer showing at home, and a berth at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal in July is likely to kick-start a long, healthy festival run for The Witch overseas. Markets across Asia should be more than welcoming of a polished, franchise-style actioner headlined by a girl from the neighborhood.

The Bottom Line An ever-so-delicate twist on the Korean revenge thriller.

The Witch opens in a hospital facility with a wholesale massacre of (grab your pearls) children at the behest of steely Professor Baek (Cho Min-soon, star of Kim Ki-duk’s divisive Pieta ). The slaughter unfolds in blue-tinged, neo-noir light, complete with flickering bulbs and slick floors, before the action heads outside where one of just two survivors, a little boy, has been caught by Baek’s right hand, Mr. Choi (Park Hee-soon, doing his best to channel Lee Byung-hun). A girl gets away and collapses on a nearby farm, whose elderly owners, the Koos (Choi Jung-woo and Oh Min-hee), promptly take her in and get her patched up.

Ten years later, the girl, Ja-yoon (relative newcomer Kim Da-mi), is a clever young woman who has her small community—and her adoptive parents—wrapped around her finger. Her only problems seem to be a lack of funds to run the farm with, and a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s. A quick fix appears in the form of a reality competition show that Ja-yoon’s bestie Myung-hee (Ko Min-shi) is sure she can win. On the trip to Seoul for the performance, Ja-yoon meets Gong-ja (Choi Woo-shik, Okja ), who claims to know her, insisting they have a connection. He eventually leaves her be, but reports his findings to Baek, whose lackeys have been looking for Ja-yoon for a decade. The other is Choi.

Saying more about the occasionally overly-complex story would spoil it, but it is safe to say that given its title and the opening images of witchcraft lore dating from the Middle Ages to wartime human experimentation, The Witch isn’t actually a witch movie, and the title is more metaphoric. That minor quibble (for some) aside, Park’s signature acrobatic and/or creative fights (choreographed by martial arts directors Park Jung-ryul and Kim Jung-min) and set pieces (another greenhouse, industrial-chic concrete hallways) are always in service to the story, never overwhelming it, and that kicks it up a notch at the end of the second act. Kim plays Ja-yoon close to the chest—Is she a psychopath? A mutant? A superhero?—in a nicely modulated performance as a young woman coming into her own and realizing her own power. She steers clear of bratty and precocious center of attention tics too often hoisted on female characters, and layers Ja-yoon with fear, gratitude, resignation and determination as required. Park’s timing couldn’t be better.

By Korean action standards The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion is lean at two hours, but in cramming so much into the narrative it stumbles over itself on more than one occasion; it very often forgets its own internal logic and drags the final showdown out to the breaking point. The sequence’s style, energy and Kim’s coiled glee save it from tipping into overkill. Park has a good eye for visuals and great DPs in Kim Young-ho (Park’s V.I.P. , Haeundae ) and Lee Teo, yet falls into a “tell” instead of “show” trap for character and narrative momentum; Baek would give Auric Goldfinger a run for his verbose money. If a second part is in the pipeline, as the title suggests, there was no need to rush key revelations. Mowg’s pounding, atmospheric score stands out among impeccable tech specs across the board.

Production company: Gold Moon Film Production

Cast: Kim Da-mi, Cho Min-soo, Choi Woo-shik, Park Hee-soon, Kim Byung-ok, Choi Jung-woo, Ko Min-shi, Oh Min-hee

Director: Park Hoon-jung

Screenwriter: Park Hoon-jung

Producer: Park Hoon-jung, Yeon Young-sik

Executive producer: Oh Hyung-an

Director of photography: Kim Young-ho, Lee Teo

Production designer: Jo Hwa-sung

Costume designer: Jo Sang-kyung

Editor: Kim Chang-ju

Music: Mowg

World sales: Warner Bros. Korea

In Korean  

No rating, 126 minutes

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The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion Reviews

Director Park Hoon-jung and lead actress Kim Da-mi lay the groundwork for something imaginative, violent, and stuffed to the gills with palpable crunch.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2021

Plenty bloody and brutal and un-freaking-hinged, and full of twists and shifts, the work done earlier gives the rampaging chaos more a more emotional oomph than simply watching cannon fodder villains get dismantled in vicious, gory fashion.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 29, 2020

The beauty of The Witch is the dark and sublimely satisfying place Park takes us to, once we realize our hero's true motivation: survival.

Full Review | Jun 19, 2020

... [writer/director Hoon-jung] Park masterfully weaves each [narrative aspect] into and out of each other until the audience is on the edge of their seat for a ride filled with countless surprises.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 12, 2020

The biggest strengths in The Witch: Subversion's corner are its action, its cast, and its writer/director. There's frankly not enough action, but what's there is incredible.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2020

While The Witch : Part 1. The Subversion has an absolutely pitch-perfect final half-hour, I'm still somewhat miffed about all the pacing issues up until that point.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2019

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion is beautiful, heartfelt and gorgeous before turning on a coin and becoming the action sensation of the year that could rival any superhero movie with choreography that is out of this world.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jun 3, 2019

With a carrot-dangling coda that anticipates further twists in the tale, this promises to be the start of an exciting, bloody and outlandish series.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2019

Enormous fun from beginning to end. Here's hoping we don't have to wait too long for Part 2.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 7, 2019

Many viewers will inevitably feel frustrated by the film because it is so derivative but there's a lot to admire in it. One just hopes that if Park [Hoon-jung] returns to the story, he'll take it in a fresh direction. This level of talent deserves that.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 4, 2019

...requires lead actress Kim to put in a versatile performance (playing someone who is, precisely, putting in a versatile performance). In the end, after a very slow build-up, the film delivers an explosion of crazy, bloody violence...

Full Review | Mar 2, 2019

Is it a good film? Not even close. Did the director misuse good actors? Definitely.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2019

The deadly charisma of the key performers, notably newcomer Kim Da-mi as the teenage Ja-yoon, should ensure plenty of interest in further chapters in this story.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2018

Despite trying to cram too much plot, the film's atmospheric score, action sequences and visuals keep you invested in the story and what comes next.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2018

Think La Femme Nikita by way of Psychokinesis, and enjoy the ride.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2018

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion applies bone-crunching, blood-spurting action to the cinematic trend of super-gifted teens discovering their powers/true origins.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2018

[A} hell of a lot of fun and will both satisfy Korean action fans looking for something different, and leave them desperate for more.

Full Review | Jul 31, 2018

An often mesmerizing, occasionally kooky but thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2018

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Netflix’s The Witch Part 1 is an electrifying superhero origin story

The South Korean thriller is like if John Wick was in the Hunger Games.

by Alex Abad-Santos

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

While the coronavirus pandemic has smashed the brakes on Marvel and Warner Bros.’s summer blockbuster slate this year, the next great superhero movie is already here, streaming on Netflix: The Witch Part 1: The Subversion .

Look past that melodramatic, even confusing name; this is not a sequel to the 2016 horror movie The Witch . Possibly there’s some nuance lost in translating it over to English from its native Korean (the movie debuted in Korea in 2018). From its brutal and electrifying fight scenes to its icy and gritty feel and its core mystery, The Witch Part 1 is a much more exciting, unforgettable watch than its generic title may suggest.

On the surface, director Park Hoon-jung is telling a Superman-adjacent story: A very special kid, thanks to deadly circumstances, becomes an orphan and grows up trying to fit into a world that can’t even begin to understand them. It takes an extraordinary circumstance, usually a big evil thing, to get a character like this to find themselves and their true potential. That happens in this movie, too.

But the beauty of The Witch is the dark and sublimely satisfying place Park takes us to, once we realize our hero’s true motivation: survival.

At its core, The Witch is about fitting in

The Witch , at its core, is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Ja-yoon. We first meet her as a child, running away from trouble. What appears to be a black-ops arm of the government is hunting her down for reasons unknown and murders everyone in their way. Bloodied and bruised, Ja-yoon flees to a nearby farm where, in a twist of good fortune, a farmer and his elderly wife take her in and evade the dark forces that want her dead.

Flash forward 10 years later, and Ja-yoon ( Kim Da-mi ) and her family are living unbothered by any evil government agents. The family’s problems are instead depressingly mortal. Ja-yoon’s adoptive father’s farm isn’t doing so well, and her mother is flashing signs of dementia. They’re short on cash. Ja-yoon feels stuck, not being old enough or skilled enough to help her family in the way they need most. At the same time, she is also having some very mysterious splitting headaches.

Her best friend Myung-hee ( Ko Min-shi ) has an antidote — for her family’s financial problems, not the headaches — which is that Ja-yoon enter a national, televised talent competition not unlike American Idol or The Voice . While Ja-yoon isn’t old enough for a full-time job, she has the voice and appeal to become a pop star, get famous and hopefully provide her family with the money it needs.

The script gets in a few jabs at the not-so-secret workings of Korean pop stardom and the facile business of churning out music acts. But Park is more focused on showing us Ja-yoon’s greenness in endeavors like this one. She approaches everything with wide-eyed optimism, and doesn’t yet have the toughness or savvy to know what to do should she win the competition. She doesn’t even realize that the black-ops team that’s hunting her down could be watching the TV show, too.

On their girls’ trip to Seoul for a show taping, Ja-yoon and Myung-hee meet Gong-ja ( Choi Woo-Shik ), a boy with pop star looks who says he knows Ja-yoon. He seems a little too mysterious, a little too familiar, a little too stylish to not be connected to the well-funded team that’s hunting her down.

But Ja-yoon has her eyes on the competition. If she wins, she can help her ailing mom, her struggling dad, and maybe solve her own health problems. That is, until the bottom falls out.

Warning: Only keep reading if you’re not afraid of some very big spoilers.

The movie’s strength is in its absolutely fantastic twist

Ja-yoon’s shot at stardom quickly seems to be a fatal error. The boy she meets, Gong-ja, is actually in cahoots with one Professor Baek (Cho Min-soon), the icy head of the government program that’s still hunting Ja-yoon down. Her appearance on the show sets off a series of disasters which end up with Ja-yoon trading her freedom for her parents’ safety. At the same time, we get a flash of Ja-yoon’s powers which seem to be super strength, agility, and marksmanship — she takes down a team of goons in her home before Gong-ja, who also has powers, and his gang shows up.

They take Ja-yoon to Baek’s secret facility, where Baek explains that they’ve been searching for her for a very long time. Ja-yoon, like Gong-ja, was part of a government program that tinkered with kids’ brains, altering them so those kids would eventually become violent superhumans. It also turns out that the headaches Ja-yoon experiences are actually a symptom of a bigger, deadly side effect of those experiments, Baek tells her, before giving her a cure that staves off death for one month. And now, with the cure as blackmail, she’s under their control.

Ja-yoon was the most lethal superhuman created by the program, and she made it so stupidly easy for them to find her, Baek says. But then we all slowly realize that this was Ja-yoon’s plan all along.

Ja-yoon wanted to be found.

It turns out she knew about the cause of her headaches and her terminal symptoms long ago, and that, with her lack of resources, she’d never be able to find Baek and her clandestine organization on her own. Playing a young, innocent girl who had no idea about her powers was going to chum the waters and bring Baek, and her cure, out of hiding. Everything we think we know about Ja-yoon gets turned on its head. She played us like she played Baek.

Park then unfurls the true nature of his movie: It’s not so much about a superhero finding herself, but an anti-hero bent on revenge.

The twist hinges on Kim’s devastating performance. She plays Ja-yoon with the exact amount of earnestness and sweetness needed for us to believe that she’s just a young girl in a world that threatens to swallow her up. She never leans too far into these traits that the character becomes saccharine or even overwhelming; in an instant, when Kim sharpens her face and coils her brows, that girl we think we know is gone, replaced with a woman finally able to wield her immense power.

Park doesn’t allow Ja-yoon to be a saint, clearly painting her as a sociopath instead. She finds glee in the bloody pain she inflicts and the insults she throws. Ja-yoon tells one of Gong-ja’s goons to witness her greatness as Ja-yoon holds her face in her hands, like a lion toying with its dinner. Yet watching Ja-yoon break bones, crack limbs, and shoot up Baek’s henchmen is beautiful, cathartic even. Because they fell under the spell of underestimating the witch — and maybe I did, too.

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The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion review — killer sequences, a complicated plot, and a thriller full of revenge

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion  uses incredible action sequences, gorgeous visuals, and enough twists to keep you entertained, despite the jam-packed plot.

There’s nothing like a good revenge thriller. Korean writer-director Hoon-jung Park is counting on that fact with his 2018 film The Witch: Part 1 The Subversion , likely a more confusing title due to the translation into English. Following a teenage girl’s interaction with a group of people from her past, Park’s film remains taut and tense during its 125-minute runtime.

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion  opens up with a young girl running for her life, only for it to immediately fast-forward 10 years into the future. Kim Da-mi plays Ja-yoon, a girl who grew up with simple parents on a simple farm. Due to money problems, she decides to try out and advances in a national singing/talent competition. None of that matters, though, as the entire first hour sets up the twists and turn of the back half of the film, in which the audience learns everything about Ja-yoon’s past, her present, and her plan for the future.

Park’s film hedges on the vengeance of this girl, and her anger over her upbringing, one as a lab subject of sorts.  The Witch: Part 1 The Subversion brings together elements of young adult novels and stories of the last 20 years, along with the fast-paced action of large scale set pieces, like the ones seen in the James Bond  franchise. That’s not hyperbole, either. The action is riveting, and if the plot doesn’t reel you in, the action gives any viewer a good reason to keep watching, though you’ll have to stomach large quantities of blood and bullets.

The film came out two years ago in South Korea but just hit Netflix in the U.S. this weekend, likely giving it a much wider platform outside of its original theatrical release. Though the themes are a bit worn, the idea of children losing their innocence and being raised with and through violence has an eerie, slightly reaching similarity to those growing up in places and situations where violence is on every corner. It’s fiction, yes, but in this specific time in the world, it’s hard not to relate nearly everything you see with some aspect of the world around you and those you love, or even those you barely know.

Park’s thriller flips on a dime; it’s the movie’s best quality and biggest downfall. You aren’t necessarily ready for the big reveals or the dozens of deaths that follow. And in a matter of minutes, you go from knowing nothing to knowing everything. The villain gives a speech, the hero does her thing, and then all of a sudden, the film ends in a quiet stillness after a major flurry of plot and 30 minutes of high-intensity fighting.

The Witch: Part 1 The Subversion is a film leaning on its excitement and its thrills. It packs a punch, literally. And sometimes, that’s enough to keep you engaged and watching, even if the film itself could have been lighter-handed. In this case, though, the action makes The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion  a worthy watch, especially if you’re looking for something to watch that’s off the beaten path.

Article by Michael Frank

Michael Frank is a film critic and entertainment journalist based out of Brooklyn, New York, and he joined Ready Steady Cut in September 2017, publishing over 80 articles for the website. Michael’s eye for Film and TV has gotten him noticed, and he has become a Rotten Tomatoes-certified critic.

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The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion (2018)

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What it's about.

The Witch hardly reinvents the thriller wheel. In fact, part of the fun in watching it is calling out the cliches. Cold-blooded villain? Check. Antihero who defies death? Check. Senseless, bloody killings for minutes on end? Check, check, check. The Witch has everything you'd expect from an action movie, and yet, the viewing experience is all the better for it. 

By trimming all the unnecessary fat and zeroing in on the action, director Park Hoon-jung delivers a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred film that could hold a candle to the John Wick franchise. Like those films, the movements here are sharp and the gore relentless. The only difference is that The Witch is led by a teenage girl—seemingly flimsy but deliciously deranged, Kim-Dami is magnetic in her breakout role as the titular witch Ja-yoon. It's also a bit like Stranger Things in that sense, but comparisons aside, The Witch stands out as a razor-edged entry into the genre. 

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