[News Culture] Yoo Hae-jin is trading the Joseon era for one of the most unsettling chapters in modern Korean history.
Coming off the blockbuster run of The King’s Warden, Yoo returns to theaters in The Assassin(s) as Cheol-gu, a police inspector who witnesses the attempted assassination of South Korea’s First Lady during the Liberation Day ceremony on August 15, 1974. What begins as an eyewitness account soon becomes something far more dangerous as Cheol-gu starts digging into questions surrounding the case. (Korean Film Council) in The Assassin(s). Photo courtesy of Hive Media Corp.
The newly released stills place Cheol-gu directly inside that tension. At the ceremony, he stands amid the chaos with his attention fixed on the scene rather than the panic around him. Another image finds him at the police station, locked into a phone call as his investigation begins to move beyond what he witnessed that day.
The character gives Yoo a notably restrained role built around observation, suspicion and persistence. Cheol-gu is not simply chasing a suspect; he is trying to reconcile what he saw with the questions that emerge afterward, pulling him steadily toward a larger mystery.
That puts Yoo at the center of The Assassin(s), which reconstructs the 1974 incident through a mix of historical record and cinematic imagination. Park Hae-il joins him as newspaper social affairs editor Jae-hwan, while Lee Min-ho plays rookie reporter Yeong-il, with the three characters approaching the same case from different directions. (Korean Film Council) in The Assassin(s). Photo courtesy of Hive Media Corp.
For Yoo, the film arrives with considerable box-office expectations attached.
His filmography already includes five Korean films that crossed the 10-million-admission mark: King and the Clown, Veteran, A Taxi Driver, Exhuma and, most recently, The King’s Warden. The latter became one of 2026’s biggest theatrical successes and pushed Yoo into the rare position of having five such hits on his résumé. (Korean Film Council)l of Cheol-gu lies less in adding another number to that record than in the type of performance the role demands. Yoo has built much of his career on making characters feel lived-in and immediately recognizable, whether working in comedy, historical drama or large-scale commercial cinema. Here, that familiarity is redirected into a man whose instincts tell him that the official picture does not fully add up.
The stills suggest that tension will build quietly rather than through spectacle: a look held too long, a detail that refuses to disappear, and a detective who keeps asking questions as the risks around him grow.
Starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho, The Assassin(s) is scheduled to open in Korean theaters during the 2026 Chuseok holiday.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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