It can be really testing having difficult neighbours, just ask South Korea. With its never-ending Kim dynasty, who always appear to be the biggest attention seekers on the political stage, with their communist rule and fondness for nuclear missiles, North Korea is keen to grab all the limelight, whatever the cost.

Although this often puts the good people of South Korea in the shadows, it should not be forgotten that their history has also been a tad on the tasty side in the past, as this film explores, as it focuses on a tense, forty day period leading up to the assassination of its president in 1979.

The seventies, and one man rules supreme in South Korea – President Park (Sung-min Lee). Not only is he the head of government, he also controls the KCIA (the Korea Central intelligence Agency), which has powers that go far beyond that of government.

Park is alarmed when former KCIA director Park Yong-gak (Do-won Kwak) decides to defect to the US and spill his guts in front of a US Senate committee, bad mouthing the current South Korean regime and its leader. On top of that, he’s written a memoir that doesn’t put the president in a good light either.

He decides that he must be stopped, one way or another, so sends his current KCIA director Kim Kyu-Pyeong (Lee Byung-hun) to the US to sort out this mess, one way or another. But when Kim meets up with Park, he learns that their esteemed leader may not have the best interests of their country at heart, which challenges Kim’s loyalty to his leader, leading him to believe that perhaps he’s not the right choice to rule South Korea after all.

Director Min-ho Woo’s film is a fascinating look at a particularly tense period in recent South Korean history. It’s a film that captures the era with a keen eye for detail, making it an evocative reflection of the end of the seventies.

There are also some excellent performances too, most notably from Kwak and Lee, with Kwak playing the more flamboyant of the two, and Lee very much straight-laced and by the book.

Where the film feels a little flat is with the president himself. Although played well by Sung-min Lee, with a cool, menacing undertone, his dictatorship is never really fully examined, nor what it’s like for the South Korean people to have to live under his regime on a daily basis. It’s clear why his current KCIA director starts to have doubts, but there’s no sense of his impact on the general population.

It does slowly build to a tense and exciting finale however, as the film serves as a reminder that regardless of how powerful the person in charge appears, there is always someone on the sidelines keen to take that power away from them, one way or another.