Yu Hae-jin and Park Hae-il Lead First Film About 1974 First Lady Assassination, Headed to Toronto

Yu Hae-jin announced at the film's press showcase in Seoul on August 10 that Assassin(s) is the first Korean film to dramatize the assassination of First Lady Yuk Young-soo, a subject that, despite decades of documentary and broadcast coverage, had never been brought to the cinema screen. The 1974 shooting sits at one of the more contested junctures in modern Korean political history, and director Heo Jin-ho's decision to frame it as a mystery thriller rather than a straightforward historical dramatization reflects a deliberate calculation about how to handle contested material.

The event at the center of the film occurred on August 15, 1974, Korea's Liberation Day, when Mun Se-gwang, a second-generation Korean-Japanese man, fired a pistol at President Park Chung-hee during the national ceremony in Seoul. The shot missed the president but struck First Lady Yuk Young-soo, who died from her injuries. Questions about the circumstances of the attack, the security failures, and what followed have persisted in public discussion for more than fifty years.

Yu Hae-jin plays Cheol-gu, a detective assigned to protect the Liberation Day ceremony who witnesses the shooting firsthand. When a colleague is arrested and blamed for the security breakdown, Cheol-gu begins chasing the truth on his own. Yu described the character as someone driven by professional instinct and personal grievance in equal measure. "He was there. He saw it," Yu said at the showcase. "When his colleague is dragged away unjustly, and then when he's tracking the case, I tried to let each of those emotional states take priority in turn."

Yu comes into this project with considerable commercial momentum. His period film The King's Man (왕과 사는 남자) drew more than 16.9 million admissions during the Lunar New Year holiday season earlier this year, making it one of the highest-performing Korean films of 2026. He returns to cinemas for the Chuseok holiday, a slot that historically drives the year's second major theatrical surge.

Park Hae-il plays Jae-hwan, the head of a newspaper's city desk, and his casting marks his first film in four years: his previous credits were Decision to Leave and Hansan: Rising Dragon, both 2022. He also reunites with director Heo after a decade, having last worked with him on The Last Princess in 2016. Park noted that Heo's production approach made a particular difference during the shoot. Rather than building sets, the director and his team prioritized actual locations from the period, filling them with period-accurate props. "The 1970s newspaper office the art team created felt like something out of another era," Park said. "The props and the physical space gave the actors something real to push against."

Lee Min-ho, cast as Young-il, a newly hired reporter from a wealthy family, described playing the role with deliberate inexperience as a guide. "I tried not to approach it as a trained journalist would," he said. "I wanted every space, every situation to feel raw, like it was the first time."

Heo Jin-ho said he had been carrying the story for more than ten years before committing to a production approach. The sticking point, he explained, was how to handle historical material where official accounts and public memory diverge. "The event has been covered and discussed," he said at the showcase. "But the unresolved questions kept pulling at me. The challenge was finding an angle that was balanced and not ideologically loaded." His solution was the mystery-thriller genre, which gave the film room to dramatize without claiming to settle what history has not. Characters in the film are composites rather than direct representations of historical figures, a choice that gives the screenplay some distance from the factual record.

Before its domestic release, the film will screen at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival in the Gala Presentation section, one of the festival's more prominent selection categories. Heo described the invitation as "a small gift before opening," and mentioned that the festival's selection committee specifically praised the cast's performances when extending the invitation. A Gala slot at TIFF is not uncommon for major Korean productions, but it carries weight as a signal about the film's positioning for international audiences.

The Chuseok holiday window this year is notably competitive. Tazza: Beelzebub's Song, the final installment in the long-running Tazza gambling franchise, is also scheduled for that period, alongside The Intern with Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee, Lee Chang-dong's Netflix feature A Possible Love, and a film starring Koo Kyo-hwan. It is an unusual concentration of high-profile Korean releases for a single holiday corridor.

Yu was measured about commercial expectations. "At Lunar New Year, more people came than I ever imagined," he said. "I'd like the same for this one, but everything has to align for that to happen. What I can say is that theaters seem to have some life in them again, and I hope we add to that."