Humint

Espionage rarely stays clean, and this one gets messy early. A South Korean agent tracking a drug ring across Russia runs headlong into a North Korean operative, and what began as a narcotics case unspools into something with far more tangled loyalties. The tagline reads like an intercepted transmission, compromised and extracting, which suits a film built on the specific paranoia of human intelligence work, where the asset, the enemy and the ally can turn out to be one person.

Two hours gives it room for procedure as well as pursuit, and it will reward viewers who like their spy thrillers cold, complicated and geopolitically pointed. Expect a plot that withholds, adversaries with more in common than either would admit, and violence that lands hard when it finally arrives. Anyone who enjoys the precision of Korean genre filmmaking, or cross-border thrillers where politics is part of the tension, should put this near the top of the queue.