Good News

Set in 1970, Good News opens aboard a Japanese domestic flight from Tokyo that is seized in midair by a cell of young radicals who demand to be flown to Pyongyang. What begins as a hijacking quickly becomes a diplomatic emergency spanning three governments, none of which is prepared to look weak, tell the truth, or take responsibility for whatever happens next.

On the ground, a mysterious operative known only as "Nobody" (Sul Kyung-gu) is pulled back into service by Park Sang-hyeon (Ryoo Seung-bum), the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, to attempt something audacious: rather than storming the aircraft, they will steal it from the air — talking the hijackers down onto a runway that is not where the hijackers think it is. Drafted into the scheme is Seo Go-myung (Hong Kyung), a straight-arrow Air Force lieutenant whose voice on the radio must sell the deception minute by minute.

Byun Sung-hyun stages the ensuing 136 minutes as a black comedy of institutional panic, in which officials in Seoul and Tokyo sprint between committee rooms, blame each other in advance, and improvise an enormous piece of theater. Inspired by a real and genuinely bizarre Cold War episode, the film keeps its laughs and its dread on the same runway, and never lets you forget that real people are strapped into seats above it.

Byun Sung-hyun's subject is not the hijacking but the machinery that converts crisis into narrative. The film argues that modern states rarely solve emergencies; they stage them, dressing a runway, a press conference, and a set of uniforms until the story becomes more governable than the facts.

Its cruelest joke is that the deception works — and that the men who invented it will be the ones to decide who gets remembered for it. The title is the thesis: "good news" is a manufactured product, assembled by people whose primary fear is not death but embarrassment. Around that satire the film sets a quieter, sadder question about the individuals — the lieutenant on the radio, the nameless fixer, the idealists in the cabin — who are all, in different ways, expendable to the story their superiors intend to tell.

Reading 1 — a systemic satire. The dominant critical view treats the film as an attack on institutions rather than individuals: no one in it is truly evil, merely afraid of blame, and the tragedy emerges from the aggregate cowardice of a bureaucracy. Under this reading, the ending is neither victory nor defeat but the system doing exactly what systems do — surviving, and rewriting the event to suit itself.

Good News arrived as one of 2025's most warmly received Korean films, premiering at the Toronto and Busan festivals before a worldwide Netflix launch on October 17, 2025. It holds a 92% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes (from 24 reviews at the time of writing), with Variety calling it a sharp political farce and Screen Daily's Robert Daniels describing it as "a biting satire about bureaucratic spinelessness" with "fantastic, multi-layered performances" from its ensemble.

Its cultural charge comes from the material itself. The Yodogo hijacking is a genuinely strange node of Cold War history binding Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and by retelling it as farce Byun implicates all three states at once — the incompetence of officials on both sides of the Korea Strait, and the propaganda apparatus that converted the episode into a triumph. Reviewers noted how directly the film's portrait of governments managing perception rather than reality speaks to the present political moment, a reading Byun endorsed when he told Variety the Cold War story "still resonates today."

Within Byun's filmography the film marks a pivot: after the stylized noir of his earlier work, this is his first full turn into satire, and it extends the recent wave of Korean cinema — from The Attorney to Netflix's own political thrillers — that reexamines the authoritarian 1970s through genre. It also continues a lineage of global Cold War black comedies stretching back to Dr. Strangelove, the reference point critics most often invoked.

Praised: Reviews converged on the ensemble performances and the screenplay. Critics singled out Sul Kyung-gu's enigmatic, deliberately stylized Nobody and his chemistry with Hong Kyung, whose back-and-forth exchanges were described as bringing the script to life, along with Ryoo Seung-bum's slippery KCIA chief. The satirical writing drew the strongest praise — the film's skewering of officials in both Japan and Korea, its handling of propaganda and public manipulation, and its ability to hold comedy and dread in the same frame. Its 92% Tomatometer (24 reviews) reflects a broadly enthusiastic critical consensus, with some reviewers calling it one of the year's best.

Criticised: The most common reservation concerned length and excess: at 136 minutes the film was felt by some to be "a little too much of a good thing," with a busy structure and a tonal range that not every viewer found consistently controlled. Some found the mixture of broad farce with a genuine hostage tragedy uneasy, and the abstract, non-naturalistic conception of Nobody divided viewers — the very quality Sul Kyung-gu said he wrestled with during shooting.

Contested: The final act, which shifts decisively from comedy toward bleakness and settles the question of recognition and credit, generated the most discussion, as did the film's willingness to make farce out of an incident in which real people were terrorized.

Verdict: A confident, sharply written political black comedy — occasionally overstuffed, but one of the most acclaimed Korean films of 2025 and a significant tonal departure for its director.