In his latest thriller, director Lee Jong-pil cranks the tension to apoplectic levels as a pair of North Korean soldiers attempt a perilous defection to the South. Star actor Lee Je-hoon, so memorable in Architecture 101 (2012), I Can Speak (2017), is Gyu-nam, whose dreams of a better life compel him and his friend Dong-hyuk (rising star Hong Xa-bin) to make a mad dash for the DMZ. But doggedly pursuing them is State Security agent Hyun-sang, played with reptilian intensity by Koo Kyo-hwan. The chase sequences are dazzlingly staged, feats of intricate choreography and vertiginous camerawork that leave you gasping. Gunshots echo across dusky landscapes as the two desperate defectors scramble over rocks and race through underbrush, the ruthless Hyun-sang always just a few steps behind. But Lee's real masterstroke is the psychologically acute portrait of two men locked in a deadly pas de deux - the hunter and the hunted, each clinging to his own terrifying delusions about the nature of freedom. "Do you think the South is nothing but paradise?" Hyun-sang sneers. "There is no such paradise in the world." It's a remorseless machine of a movie that insists the quest for liberty is a Sisyphean struggle against despair.