Film Review: Good News (굿뉴스) (2025) - South Korea
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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Truth, Lies, and the Absurd Theater of Power - Korean Director Byun Sung-hyun’s “Good News” arrives on Netflix like a meticulously timed satirical bomb, detonating laughter that curdles into something sharper, angrier, and profoundly relevant. Based on the jaw-dropping, almost-too-absurd-to-believe true story of the 1970 “Yodo-go” hijacking, the film transforms a potential geopolitical thriller into a masterclass of sociopolitical farce. It’s a film where the tension isn't just in the hijacked plane, but in the smoke-filled backrooms where bureaucrats decide that the most practical solution to international terrorism is... a really big, really unconvincing lie.
The plot, ripe with inherent ridiculousness, is this: A ragtag band of earnest, hopelessly out-of-their-depth Japanese Red Army militants seize a plane, demanding passage to the communist promised land of North Korea. Enter South Korea’s KCIA, less concerned with saving lives than with saving face and scoring points against the North. Their solution? Enlist a scruffy, enigmatic fixer known only as “Nobody” (Sul Kyung-gu, in a performance of jester-like brilliance). Nobody’s task? To transform Seoul’s Gimpo Airport into a Potemkin Pyongyang overnight – hang fake propaganda banners, paint over signs, coach terrified civilians into playing cheerful DPRK citizens, all while keeping the plane circling overhead. It’s bureaucratic lunacy elevated to high-stakes theater of the absurd.
What makes “Good News” soar is its perfectly calibrated, mordant tone. It possesses a mordant giggliness, a nervous energy that bubbles just beneath the surface of genuine peril. Byun masterfully blends the claustrophobic tension of the hijacked cabin with the frantic, darkly comic chaos of the ground operation. This is less “Argo” and more “Dr. Strangelove” meets “The Office” during a constitutional crisis. Everyone involved – the ideologically confused hijackers, the cynical KCIA spooks, the flailing government ministers – is portrayed, often hilariously, as varying degrees of narcissistic dolt. The film savagely suggests that in the halls of power, incompetence and self-interest are far more common, and dangerous, than grand villainy.
Sul Kyung-gu is the film’s magnetic, chaotic center. His “Nobody” is a delightful enigma – part conman, part weary philosopher, part desperate stage manager. Sul breaks the fourth wall with conspiratorial winks and weary sighs, inviting us to marvel at the sheer stupidity unfolding, yet grounding it with a world-weary pragmatism that’s strangely compelling. He’s matched by Hong Kyung as Lieutenant Seo, the film’s trembling moral compass – a young officer horrified by the charade yet powerless to stop it. And Ryoo Seung-bum delivers a boisterous, scenery-chewing turn as the KCIA director, embodying the blustering, ambition-driven core of the operation.
Technically, the film is a marvel of controlled chaos. Cinematographer Hyung-rae Cho finds both cramped tension within the plane and the heightened drama of the frantic airport transformation. One sequence, a standoff conducted over crackling radio frequencies, is shot and edited with the sweaty-palmed intensity of a spaghetti western duel – a brilliant visual metaphor for the film’s blend of genres and stakes.
Is it flawless? Almost, but not quite. The film’s mid-section pacing can wobble. The necessary scenes of bureaucratic wrangling and logistical nightmares, while inherently part of the satire, occasionally stretch a beat too long, causing the razor-sharp bite of the satire to momentarily blunt. It’s a minor dip in momentum in an otherwise exhilarating ride.
“Good News” is a triumph. It’s bitterly angry beneath its uproarious surface, a sharp, hilarious, and surprisingly deep excavation of how institutions prioritize perception over reality, ideology over humanity, and petty power plays over actual solutions. It ruthlessly lampoons social ideologies, the machinery of the state, and the fundamental pettiness lurking within human nature, especially when draped in the cloak of authority. Like the best satires, spring immediately to mind – it understands that the most effective way to critique the terrifying absurdity of power is often to laugh directly in its face. Truth, “Good News” reminds us with savage wit, isn’t just stranger than fiction; it’s frequently far, far funnier, especially when it’s dressed up in such a spectacularly ridiculous lie. One of 2025's best, and most necessary, comedies. (Neo, 2026)