The Informant screened at the London Korean Film Festival, 9th Nov, 2025. This is the text of my live introduction.
In this introduction, I am going to talk not so much about The Informant itself as about the genre of films to which it belongs and which it sometimes mercilessly lampoons for laughs.
When characters go undercover in the movies, they bring viewers with them into hidden, illicit worlds, investigating and exposing the rot within the more shadowy sides of society – and of the justice system. Here organised crime – and its flipside, corruption among the police or politicians – are revealed, and the line between cops and robbers, law and lawlessness, the political and the personal, become blurred. Informants and infiltrators, undercover cops, bent cops and cops breaking bad, disguise, deceit and double-dealing are all part of these film’s generic makeup. They also offer an illusory world where subterfuge rules, where loyalties are always being turned on their head, and where different intentions and plots collide chaotically. In these films, characters are conflicted and their allegiances can rapidly switch and reverse – and as lies are pushed to their limits, the viewer too is never quite sure what to believer or who to root for.
Prominent and influential examples of this kind of film from relatively recent times include Ringo Lam’s classic of heroic bloodshed City on Fire (1987), whose final act inspired Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992). These, and more recently Spike Lee’s BlackKkKlansman (2018), build immense tension as an infiltrator’s cover risks being blown, with inevitably horrific consequences. Or films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) and Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997), where undercover agents get in too deep, sleep – at least metaphorically – with the enemy, and start losing touch with who they really are and where their true allegiances lie.
The absolute apotheosis of this genre is Wai Keung Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs (2002) and Martin Scorsese’s remake The Departed (2006), in which a cop undercover in the mob is pit against a mob mole placed within the police, as both are assigned to flush the other out, even as these opposed infiltrators just want a way to escape their suffocatingly stressful masquerades.
Korean cinema occasionally works with these materials too, like in Park Hoon-jung’s New World (2013), Kim Sung-su’s extraordinary Asura: The City of Madness (2016) and Byun Sung-hyun’s The Merciless (2017), all of which have screened previously at the London Korean Film Festival – or in TV dramas like Song Hyun-wook’s 2021 TV Series Undercover (2021), based on James Hawes’ 2016 BBC series of the same name, or Han Dong-wook’s The Worst of Evil (2023).
Meanwhile, so established are the conventions of the undercover movie that they are open to parody and pastiche, as in for example Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop (1990) or Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street (2012), or in Korean films like Park Kwang-chun’s She’s on Duty (2005) or Lee Byeon-heon’s runaway box-office hit Extreme Job (2022). The latter, which screened at the London Korean Film Festival, follows a crew of detectives who take over a chicken shop as part of a surveillance, stakeout and sting operation, but find their restaurant becoming more successful than their police work has ever been. Here, as often in the undercover movie, pretence creates its own reality. One might even regard this aspect of the undercover movie as providing a metacomment on the fictionality and suspension of disbelief in any feature film that draws viewers into its invented world. For whenever we let ourselves be immersed in a film’s fictive scenario, we all become agents, or at least observers, operating undercover.
Kim Seok’s farcical The Informant is definitelyat the more comic end of this genre, as it knowingly sends up the very tropes from which it is constituted, and presents us with a series of larger-than-life characters and comicbook scenarios, and violently interweaves different storylines to amplify the absurdist mayhem. Still, the element of surprise is key to its criss-crossing, double-crossing and triple-crossing plots, so I have no intention of spoiling any of its details. I hope you enjoy it.
My programme note: In Gosan, ‘dumbass’ Detective Oh Nam-hyeok (Heo Sung-tae) faces repeated demotions for incompetence. Nam-hyeok admits that his ace in the hole, the informant Jo Tae-bong (Jo Bok-rae), is better at infiltration work than an actual undercover cop. Yet Tae-bong is also using their low-level sting operations as a clandestine way of enriching himself – something that Nam-hyeok too is contemplating. Yet these small fish are about to stumble across a much bigger criminal pond involving Nam-hyeok’s corrupt chief (Jang Hyuk-jin), a murderous property kingpin (Cha Soon-bae), an abducted undercover detective and a missing ledger. Deceit, disguise and double-dealing reign amid the ensuing chaos, as seemingly everyone is hiding something.
Kim Seok’s action comedy knowingly – and relentlessly – subverts the established tropes of ‘cops and robbers’ movies, and keeps wrong-footing our expectations, faking us out in much the same way that its characters constantly dissemble. It is a broad, barrelling entertainment, never predictable but always funny.
© Anton Bitel
