Gong Hyo-jin and Lee Jung-eun Reunite as Mother and Daughter in Gyeongju Goryeo, Opening August 26

Gong Hyo-jin almost didn't make it into Gyeongju Goryeo. Scheduling conflicts led her to decline the film once, but she couldn't stop wondering who would end up playing Jangjoo, the eldest daughter at the center of a family revenge plot. "The writing had a completeness you could feel," she said in a meeting with press on the 19th in Seoul's Jongno district. "Even after I finished reading the script, I kept thinking about it for days."

That lingering pull eventually won out, and the news that Lee Jung-eun had already been cast as the mother, Oksil, settled the matter. The two had played a mother-daughter pair in the beloved 2019 KBS drama When the Camellia Blooms, and Gong describes their working relationship with genuine warmth. "On screen she's my mother, but in real life she feels like a comfortable older sister," she said. "Our interpretations of scenes matched almost every time, and because we'd already worked together, we already knew how the other person would approach things. That kind of connection creates real synergy."

Director Kim Mi-jo's film centers on four women: Oksil (Lee Jung-eun) and her three surviving daughters Jangjoo (Gong Hyo-jin), Yeongju (Park So-dam), and Dongju (Lee Yeon). Eight years after their youngest sister and daughter was killed on a school field trip to the city of Gyeongju, the family kidnaps the convicted murderer Baek Sang-hyeon (Byun Yo-han) and sets off in a yellow van to finish what the courts, in their view, left undone. The title is a double meaning: Gyeongju is the destination, and also the name of the girl they lost.

The setup sounds like a crime thriller, and there are moments of genuine tension. But director Kim moves the film freely between black comedy, family drama, and raw action depending on what any given scene requires. A running gag early in the film captures the tonal range well: the four women panic completely when a large insect gets into the van, breaking a window before they manage to get rid of it. They're wearing matching "FAMILY" T-shirts. In the trunk is a man wrapped in black plastic.

Gong's character Jangjoo is designed as the audience's anchor. While her mother and sisters are pulled forward by grief and conviction, Jangjoo carries the weight of ordinary life: a husband, a child, responsibilities that don't pause for a revenge trip. "She probably worried about what would happen to the family she was leaving behind," Gong said. "She might have even wanted the plan to fail." The actress said she hoped viewers would find themselves asking what they would have done in Jangjoo's place, which is the precise kind of moral unease the film seems to be going for.

There is also something specifically Korean about the character that Gong was clearly drawn to. Jangjoo is the classic K-jangnyeo, the eldest daughter who understands her mother best, defers the most, and quietly absorbs the most. The film gives her a late-film eruption where everything she has suppressed finally surfaces, and Gong plays that moment with the kind of restrained buildup that makes the release hit harder. "I thought about a daughter who is most afraid of disappointing her mother," she said, "of her mother being hurt more deeply than she already is."

Lee Jung-eun's Oksil holds the film's emotional spine together. She plays the mother as someone whose warmth has been shuttered by grief: stonefaced through most of the revenge planning, yet capable of undoing the audience with a single look or an offhand sentence. The film doesn't let her be simply monstrous or simply sympathetic, and Lee carries that complexity without overplaying it.

Byun Yo-han takes on the role of Baek Sang-hyeon, the killer who becomes the family's captive. The character is written with a layered nastiness that doesn't soften under pressure: even cornered and helpless, he radiates menace, and Byun leans into the discomfort of what it means to feel both that he deserves what's coming and that the women delivering it are breaking something in themselves to do it. Park So-dam and Lee Yeon fill out the sister trio with distinct energies, and their collective bickering reads as genuinely familial rather than choreographed.

As the film moves into its final act, the comedy recedes and the pacing tightens. The revenge, when it arrives, is not triumphant in any clean sense. "Films like Gyeongju Goryeo and Married Killer both give people a release," Gong said, referencing her concurrent MBC drama where she plays a legendary assassin. "They show situations people have only imagined privately, or maybe only dreamed about." The distinction she drew was important: catharsis without endorsement, the gap between what we feel and what we'd actually do.

Gong was careful not to make predictions about box office performance, calling commercial results "the domain of heaven," but she didn't hide what she's hoping for. "I want as many people as possible to see it," she said. "I want to feel that trembling experience of watching the numbers grow. More than anything, I want this to be a film I can't forget in my filmography."

Gyeongju Goryeo opens on the 26th. It runs 111 minutes and is rated for audiences 15 and older.