Review | Netflix movie review: Ballerina – Korean actress Jeon Jong-seo reunites with The Call director to play an assassin in slick and gory thriller

A slickly executed Korean thriller from The Call director Lee Chung-hyun, Ballerina stars Jeon Jong-seo as an assassin avenging the death of her old friend

While the script offers precious little invention beneath its polished surface, Jeon’s cold-as-ice angel of vengeance is the film’s saving grace

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Jeon Jong-seo as Jang Ok-ju in a still from “Ballerina”, a slickly executed Korean thriller on Netflix directed by Lee Chung-hyun. Photo: Yoo Eun Mi/Netflix

Published: 1:30pm, 5 Oct 2023

3/5 stars

A female assassin sets out to avenge her best friend’s death the only way she knows how in The Call director Lee Chung-hyun’s slickly executed thriller.

Reuniting with leading lady Jeon Jong-seo (Burning), Ballerina is a lean and unflinching exercise in neon and blood-drenched action that should sate fans of such movies, despite lacking the genre-bending originality of Lee’s attention-grabbing debut.

In years to come, Ballerina may find itself vying for attention alongside Len Wiseman’s coming John Wick spin-off of the same name, slated to star Ana de Armas in a similar role and hit cinemas screens in the summer of 2024.

For the time being, Lee’s film already owes a huge debt to forerunners in this super-stylised space, most notably Luc Besson’s Nikita, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

Jeon stars as Ok-ju, a laconic loner who has parted ways with the shadowy international organisation that trained her to be a remorseless killing machine. Her quiet, solitary existence is disrupted when, out of the blue, she receives a call from Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), a ballerina with whom she was once very close.

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