A genre director who builds his suspense out of procedure rather than gore: a magistrate arguing about paperwork while the sun goes down. He came to it late and by way of a failure, and Kingdom shows how much he learned in the gap.
Fi1m perspective
Early in Kingdom (2019), the magistrate of Dongnae has his dead laid out under straw mats in the courtyard and is still arguing about procedure as dusk comes. Kim Seong-hun holds on the row of mats. He holds long enough for us to start counting them, and we knew exactly what was coming, and we were frightened anyway when one of them moved. That shot is his method in miniature. The fright is built out of officials, timetables and fading daylight, and the monster is only let in once the paperwork has finished failing.
He took the long way round. He began as an assistant director on romantic comedies in 2003 and 2004, and his first feature, How the Lack of Love Affects Two Men (2006), was poorly received and did not lead anywhere. Eight years passed. Then came A Hard Day (2014), a black comedy thriller he also wrote, which is the film that fixed his reputation for tight plotting and a dark sense of humour, and Tunnel (2016), a disaster film that spends as much of its attention on the bureaucrats and the television crews above ground as on the man trapped below it. The two seasons of Kingdom (2019–2020) followed, then the prequel special Kingdom: Ashin of the North (2021), and Ransomed (2023), a thriller drawn from real events and shot partly in Morocco.
What he does well is rhythm. He plans carefully and shoots precisely, and the result is that his set pieces arrive on time and end before they wear out. He has said that avoiding excessive violence is his style, and it is true: the horror in Kingdom is in the waiting, not the wound. Much of that is a partnership. The screenwriter Kim Eun-hee, who has worked with him three times, keeps the rules of the outbreak simple and never breaks them, which frees him to hold a shot rather than cut to the next scare. The actor Ha Jung-woo has been in front of his camera twice, and the films are the steadier for it.
The failures are honest ones. The debut showed a director who did not yet know how to do what he wanted, and it took him most of a decade to learn. The move to a series worried him too; he told an interviewer, "I struggle so much to complete a scenario for a two-hour film", and was not sure he had managed the longer form. We did not see the doubt on screen. Kingdom is as tightly built as anything he has made, the palace scenes standing still while the countryside runs for its life.
He has gone back to feature length with Ransomed, which is where his training lies. We would watch him at either length, provided somebody in the frame is arguing about procedure while something under a mat begins to stir.
Biography
Kim Seong-hun (김성훈) is a South Korean film and television director and screenwriter. He was born on 20 February 1971 in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, and studied at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
He began his career as an assistant director on the romantic comedies Oh! Happy Day (2003) and He Was Cool (2004). His feature debut was How the Lack of Love Affects Two Men (2006). He later directed and wrote A Hard Day (2014) and Tunnel (2016).
Kim directed the Netflix series Kingdom (2019–2020), for which he is credited as creator, as well as the special episode Kingdom: Ashin of the North (2021). He has also directed Ransomed (2023). For A Hard Day, he received several Best Director awards, including at the Grand Bell Awards and Baeksang Arts Awards.
