James Y. Lee
In an era that’s seen a rise in long-runtime epics, Lee Jong-pil’s Escape initially presents itself as a kind of respite from that trend—first by presenting a brisk 96-minute-long runtime, and then with an opening scene that barely spares a second to yank us into the narrative at hand. We’re thrust straight into the story of Lim Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon), who’s putting up a front of sleeping in his military quarters, until he immediately gets up to flee the area, briskly moving through the mess hall and navigating his way through a minefield with a hand-drawn map wall the way up until he reaches a fence. At that point, an alarm on his watch goes off, and he navigates that exact same path back to his bunk, almost immaculately retracing his steps before his troop needs to wake up once more— and right away, we understand the stakes at hand. Context about the daunting means of escape from North Korea’s authoritarian regime makes abundantly clear what exactly Kyu-nam is risking, which immediately fosters curiosity about how the story might further unfold from what proves to be a ruthlessly economic introduction. Not a frame is wasted in the edit, the script, or otherwise, and it’s impressive enough to be intriguing.
But that intrigue is steadily lost once the story of Escape begins to sprawl outward, inviting more and more figures within the scope of Kyu-nam’s intended mission in a way that would have demanded further payoff and expansion of runtime, or a significant shifting in narrative priorities. This film is less intended to accurately represent the perils of North Korean defectors—for that, I would humbly direct you to Madeleine Gavin’s jaw-droppingly potent documentary, Beyond Utopia—and more so functions as a conventional thriller operating within the constraints of a very dire real-world issue. To that extent, however, so many of its conventions are plain enough so as to make it unexceptional; so many of its thrills get resolved by convenience; so many of its constraints are what prevent it from turning into a more riveting experience.
The first complication that Kyu-nam hits as his escape plan unfolds is twofold, and based on one person; Dong-hyuk (Hong Xa-bin), a fellow soldier who spots Kyu-nam during his earlier escape attempt, and also craves to return to his mother and sister in South Korea. He’s also much more impulsive than Kyu-nam is, as promptly evidenced by the fact that he himself attempts escape more clumsily, and fails to climb under the fence in time for the entire troop to spot him and Kyu-nam, who tries to pass off his attempts to dissuade Dong-hyuk from going further as an attempt to try and apprehend him.
A series of confused intentions has them both apprehended—but Kyu-nam is promptly freed by State Security officer Ri Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan), who buys Kyu-nam’s alibi of trying to apprehend Dong-hyuk and takes it as a reason to elevate Kyu-nam to a heroic status in the North Korean military. Yet Kyu-nam doesn’t take kindly to what he sees as Hyun-sang’s attempt to gridlock him into the military by raising him further in the ranks. With steadfast insistence, he instead further risks his life on his flight from North Korea, attempting also to bring Dong-hyuk with him by any means necessary so that both of them can seek the freedom they desire in the South, constantly evading Hyun-sang’s forces in the process.
These kinds of escape-espionage thrillers have proven to be a dime a dozen, yet already, some kind of elevation exists for Escape in that its real-world-concern conceit is an immediate draw. The totalitarian grasp that North Korea has over its people has always been a deadly force with an all-seeing eye, yet there’s value to be found in how humanity is often sought through the things that slip in between its cracks. The film’s most striking early moment by far is when Kyu-nam reminisces on his deteriorating family over the course of his growth into adulthood, set to the backdrop of South Korean artist Zion.T’s “Yanghwa BRDG,” its chorus’s hook constantly drawing attention to the inherently human need to seek a better life for oneself—something he hears over the radio that receives South Korean signals as he spends time at a watchtower overlooking the border. That proves to certainly be impactful for someone like Kyu-nam when, not even minutes prior, we’re treated to a glimpse of hooded attempted defectors being slaughtered by a firing squad to terrify prospective defectors into stasis.
Not enough time, however, is spent on moments like these for them to further emotionally inform the treacherous journey that Kyu-nam and Dong-hyuk take as they near the DMZ cleaving the Korean peninsula in two. And indeed, “not enough time” proves to be a kind of mantra for most of the film’s major narrative oversights. A group of armed female nomads seeking another inmate imprisoned alongside Dong-hyuk is introduced as another variable of resistance to oppression, but are immediately abandoned after they emerge solely in the final seconds of a shootout between the defectors and Hyun-sang’s troops. Hyun-sang’s repression-laden past as a prolific pianist proves to be vital to an understanding of why he upholds a system that forces him into a false order even as it elevates him, but the film cuts the thread short, focusing instead on his literally unbelievable tactical military prowess, as well as how he counter-intuitively sends an entire wave of men at Kyu-nam and Dong-hyuk even as he insists on keeping his search quiet.
For a film that depicts an escape inherently riddled with deeply perilous danger and risk, Escape finds so many of its narrative outs through convenience. Lee escalates its thrills in ways that certainly possess a narratively clever function, yet they contain so much circumvention of military bureaucracy and cat-and-mouse games of deceit that just barely squeeze by in Kyu-nam’s favor that some sense of threat ultimately feels missing from it all. By the time the film reaches its climax, what proves to be more summative than anything else is the image of Kyu-nam simply running past landmines washed in the rain, effectively nullifying his meticulously drawn map; it’s the kind of sustained narrative miracle that Escape effectively embodies in spirit.
Yet that feels vastly unrepresentative of the kind of fear that permeates every waking moment of real-life defectors as they sneak past the North Korean military’s all-seeing eye and through the border. These are people who cross treacherous seas in small wooden boats; who crash their cars into the DMZ and barely escape being riddled by North Korean bullets; who need to navigate a corrupt system of brokers to barely export them through a dangerously precarious network of countries. Surely, convenience, miracles, and narratively granted outs must be the last things these people bet their lives on as they try to defect from one of the most brutal regimes in the modern world.
