‘Humint’ Review: Ryoo Seung-wan Returns with a Tough, Action-Heavy Espionage Thriller on Netflix

Over the first quarter of the 21st century, Korean filmmaker Ryoo Seung-wan has established himself as one of the most celebrated and reliable directors of action and thriller cinema in South Korea—an industry long specialized in genre filmmaking. Emerging with the low-budget Die Bad, Ryoo steadily built a solid career directing large-scale genre productions and historical films, with titles such as No Blood No Tears, Crying Fist, The City of Violence, The Unjust, The Berlin File, Veteran, Smugglers, and Escape from Mogadishu, many of them major box office hits in Korean cinema.

Humint is not a Korean word. It’s the term the characters use to refer to certain types of spies—short for “human intelligence,” describing operatives or informants working for South Korea’s national security apparatus. As the film begins, Agent Zo (Zo In-sung) attempts to rescue a woman in that line of work from a group of gangsters who exploit her as a prostitute, but she dies in the process. Haunted by the failure, Zo follows a lead that draws him into a similar situation—this time in Vladivostok, Russia.

In that dense and volatile region where Russia, China, and North Korea converge, Zo is tasked with dismantling a network of drug and human trafficking targeting Korean women, run by a dangerous Russian mafia with alleged ties to the North. To achieve this, he recruits—through his own methods—the help of Chae Seon-hwa (Shin Sae-kyeong), one of the women working in a nightclub in the city. But he’s not alone: North Korean intelligence is pursuing a parallel operation, suspecting something illicit is unfolding there. Their agent, Park Geon (Park Jeong-min), has a similar mission, with one crucial difference—he already knows Chae and shares a personal history with her.

For its first hour, Humint plays like a classic espionage film, with both men orbiting around Chae without realizing the other’s presence. Meanwhile, the Russians appear to have arrangements with the North Korean consulate, whose representative, Hwang Chi-sung (Park Hae-joon), allows them free rein—over both drugs and women from his own country—in exchange for substantial sums of money. What emerges is a shifting puzzle of loyalties, as Chae effectively works for everyone at once, and the competing interests—Zo, Park, Hwang, and the Russian mob—push the situation toward an inevitable explosion.

The second hour delivers what most viewers came to see. After a tense stretch of interrogations and pursuits, Ryoo ramps up the pace, and from that point on Humint becomes a sustained, almost continuous action set piece. Fights unfold across multiple locations, eventually converging all the principal characters—along with an army of Russian henchmen—into a single arena, where the film unleashes not one but several shootouts, brawls, hand-to-hand combat sequences, and generous bursts of bloodshed.

Efficient and sharply controlled in its handling of rhythm, space, and the acrobatic choreography of action cinema—arguably, the most “modest” opening sequence is the film’s best—Humint also taps into the ever-tense relationship between the two Koreas. Its two operatives are trained to compete and distrust one another, yet gradually recognize that they are, in fact, fighting on the same side—against corrupt superiors and ruthless Russian gangsters. In the massacre that follows, both renewed and lingering ties between them play a decisive role.

Amid all this, there’s also a love story, a thread of sacrifice, and a central character—Zo—driven by the need to redeem his initial failure. Things don’t unfold as planned, but Ryoo manages to construct a reasonably solid and engaging narrative along the way. As the third entry in an informal trilogy set outside Korea (following The Berlin File and Escape from Mogadishu), Humint may not redefine Korean espionage cinema, but it stands as a more than worthy addition to an already rich and widely celebrated tradition.