Warning: This feature contains spoilers, so if you’ve yet to see Shiri, please come back later!
As part of the 2025 Korean Film Festival in Australia, on 23rd August the 4K remaster of Shiri was screened during the Sydney leg, the 1999 production that put Korean cinema on the map internationally. I honestly couldn’t recall the last time I watched it, but the chance to see it on the big screen was too good to miss, and I certainly remember the first time. Perhaps like many western audiences, at least those in the UK, my first taste of Korean cinema came thanks to Tartan Video releasing Nowhere to Hide (also from 1999) on DVD in 2002. With a cover that declared “A SURE-FIRE HIT FOR FANS OF ‘HARD BOILED‘” it practically jumped off the shelf into my hands, and while it arguably bares very little resemblance to any John Woo movie, let alone Hard Boiled, it did its job. My interest was piqued enough to want to explore more of this country called Korea’s cinematic output, and I didn’t have to wait long.
Shiri UK DVD Cover
The following year Tartan Video would release Shiri, and if the cover blurb for Nowhere to Hide was misleading, then this one took it to the next level. Featuring cover artwork that consisted of a woman in side profile, the black dress she’s wearing slit down the side, brandishing a gun and cut off at her nose so you never meet her gaze. It was an arresting image, and also one that doesn’t appear in the movie at any point (neither the scene nor the mysterious woman!). The quote was even better (courtesy of the UK movie magazine Empire) which read “A mix of Nikita and Die Hard”. By 2003 I considered myself relatively well versed in Asian cinema, so such cunning marketing tactics shouldn’t have been able to fool such a discerning cinephile, and they didn’t. I bought the DVD of course because of my previous interest in Nowhere to Hide, and wanting to see more of what Korean cinema had to offer. Discussion closed.
Arguably more accessible than Nowhere to Hide, most of the comparisons Shiri received leaned towards its Hollywood influences, with the one recurring comment that still sticks in my memory being the belief that, if Michael Bay were to make a movie in Korea, this is exactly what it would look like (indeed even this very sites review from 2002, which is worth noting is when it got a U.S. release, states that “Shiri is more The Rock than The Killer.”). Upon watching it, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I could see where the comparisons came from. Shiri was director Kang Je-kyu’s sophomore feature after 1995’s The Gingko Bed, known for being the first Korean production to make significant use of CGI, and his directorial style intentionally leaned into creating bombastic action sequences in the same vein as Hollywood blockbusters.
The headline reads “Shiri rewrites Korean film history” referring to its breaking box office records, a turning point in South Korea’s film industry.
It was an approach that worked though, with its modest US$5 million-dollar budget going on to make more than 5 times that at the local box office, and smashing the global box office sensation from the same year, Titanic, by more than 2.5 million admissions. Tickets weren’t the only thing that were selling fast in its native South Korea, with the movies use of fish as metaphors doing for kissing gourami sales the equivalent of what A Better Tomorrow did for toothpicks in Hong Kong a decade prior. The box office returns only grew when it became the first Korean production to get Continue reading →
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