In 12.12: The Day, director Kim Sung-soo takes the pulse of a nation in crisis and finds it racing towards oblivion. This is history not as dusty textbook, but as living, breathing nightmare, a real-time thriller that puts you in the trenches of the 1979 Seoul military coup. Kim, who proved his chops with the gritty crime epic Asura: The City of Madness, here trains his unflinching eye on the corridors of power, where the serpentine General Chun Doo-hwan (played with oily menace by Hwang Jung-min as the hardly fictional "Chun Doo-gwang") is staging a "grand revolution" that's about as grand as a back-alley shakedown. As Chun's tentacles spread, the film becomes a pressure cooker of paranoia, with Jung Woo-sung's ramrod-straight Commander Lee Tae-shin the last man standing between order and anarchy. Kim's surgical screenplay lays bare the rot at the heart of the military establishment, while Lee Mo-gae's cinematography has the jittery urgency of a documentary. 12.12: The Day is a wallop of a movie, a reminder that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It's not just a recreation of history, but a warning shot across the bow of the present. In a world where democracy feels increasingly fragile, it's a film that makes you feel history in your bones. A triumph of Korean cinema.