Spies infiltrated the South Korean film industry in 2013 - and the local people welcomed them.
The notion of spying may seem romantic to people in other countries, but since the Korean war in the 1950s, South Korea's media have been reporting incidents involving real spooks. Deadly confrontations took place throughout the 20th century on both sides of the border. Nor is this a thing of the past: Seoul claims to have arrested 49 North Korean spies since 2003.
In South Korean movies, the North's spies are menacing. Kang Je-gyu's Shiri (1999), about a team of North Korean agents planning a terrorist attack in Seoul, featured Choi Min-sik (Oldboy, 2003) as a renegade bent on starting a new war. The plot of 2010 box office hit Secret Reunion centred on assassinations of defectors by North Korean spies.
Director Ryoo Seung-wan, after shooting Spies, a TV documentary about, well, spies in 2012, made The Berlin File, an action drama about North and South Korean agents in the German capital who are caught up in a deadly hunt when a weapons deal goes awry.
But recent spy films have taken a lighter approach: last year's Secretly Greatly is based on a popular webtoon about a North Korean spy who disguises himself as a country hick. The film, starring Kim Soo-hyun, took 48.7 billion won (HK$356 million) at the local box office. Also doing well in South Korean cinemas this winter is action extravaganza The Suspect, which features Gong Yoo as a North Korean agent framed for murder.
Both films play off the star power of their male leads, who portray spies betrayed by their North Korean superiors. Neither work makes much of an attempt to instill a sense of realism into their stories, using the espionage theme as a motivation for action setpieces and sentimental drama.