The Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea follows Kim Goo-nam, a taxi driver living in Yanji, a Chinese city near the North Korean border. Drowning in debt from the visa that took his wife to South Korea, and with no word from her for months, he accepts an offer from a local gangster named Myun Jung-hak: travel to Seoul and kill a man, and his debt will be cleared. He crosses illegally, but the assignment goes wrong, and he finds himself pursued by both the police and the criminals who hired him.

Na Hong-jin wrote and directed the film, his second feature after The Chaser (2008) and before The Wailing (2016) and Hope (2026). Ha Jung-woo plays Goo-nam and Kim Yoon-seok plays Myun Jung-hak, with Cho Seong-ha, Lee Cheol-min, Kwak Do-won and Im Ye-won among the credited cast of 125. The production, backed by Showbox and other Korean companies, had a budget of about 9 million US dollars and took roughly 16 million US dollars worldwide.

The film drew solid audience scores, with 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb from around 25,000 votes and 7.4 out of 10 on TMDB, while a critics' rating of 6.8 out of 10 from 25 reviews puts it somewhat below those audience figures. Running 156 minutes, it sits between crime drama and thriller, set among ethnic Koreans caught between China and South Korea.