The Age of Shadows

The Age of Shad­ows opens with a taut cat-and-mouse chase between the oppos­ing forces of Korea and Japan in the 1920s. Bul­lets are sprayed, blood splat­tered, and a toe is pinched and plucked from the bone. The assailant appears to be ruth­less police cap­tain Lee Jung-chool (played by the reli­ably excel­lent Song Kang-ho), a Kore­an earn­ing a healthy salary by turn­ing fel­low com­pa­tri­ots over to his Japan­ese overlord.

Yet the film soon piv­ots, with Jung-chool emerg­ing as the moral­ly con­flict­ed pro­tag­o­nist. We sense that his loy­al­ty to Japan has its lim­its, and this hunch is con­firmed when an alco­hol-fuelled meet­ing with resis­tance mem­ber Kim Woo-jin (Gong Yoo) sows the seed of dis­sent. Caught with­in a web of dou­ble agents, Jung-chool attempts to play both sides against the mid­dle. In a fur­ther com­pli­ca­tion, the Japan­ese police chief assigns the hot-head­ed Hashimo­to (Um Tae-goo) to mon­i­tor his every move.

The twists and turns are gen­er­al­ly han­dled well, but the script is not with­out its flaws. At times, the dia­logue gives the impres­sion of ush­er­ing the view­er, unin­formed, into a con­ver­sa­tion at its mid­point. The Japan­ese char­ac­ters are decid­ed­ly one-dimen­sion­al, while the major­i­ty of the resis­tance mem­bers are under­de­vel­oped and over­looked. Even Jung-chool’s part feels curi­ous­ly lack­ing in sub­stance, and leans a lit­tle too heav­i­ly on Song’s assured performance.

More appeal­ing than the sto­ry itself, though, are the back­drops against which every­thing plays out. The cos­tumes are lav­ish, the props bear evi­dence of care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion – the scuffed weapons, for one – and the set design pays sim­i­lar­ly close atten­tion to detail. This pre­ci­sion is com­ple­ment­ed by Kim Ji-yong’s crisp cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and by the steady hand of genre-jug­gling direc­tor Kim Jee-woon – back in Korea after helm­ing 2013’s Arnie come­back vehi­cle The Last Stand.

The action sequences are espe­cial­ly effec­tive, nev­er more so than the film’s cen­tre­piece aboard a mov­ing train. An inven­tive use of space sees var­i­ous com­part­ments and car­riages used to mon­i­tor dif­fer­ent fac­tions trad­ing words in pri­vate, before clash­ing in a well-exe­cut­ed pub­lic show­down. One par­tic­u­lar­ly neat moment sends us bound­ing down the aisle in pur­suit of the com­bat, with the cam­era reflex­ive­ly jerk­ing upwards as a gun­shot rings out.

While an ensu­ing inci­dent ups the car­nage quo­tient almost imme­di­ate­ly, from here on Kim strug­gles to cap­ture the same ener­gy. At 140 min­utes, The Age of Shad­ows is a film that peaks ear­ly and ends late. Still, there is an upside to this pon­der­ous­ness. It makes the bursts of vio­lence all the more strik­ing, pro­vid­ing plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty to drink in the rich set­tings and glo­ri­ous peri­od detail.