General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island (조선명탐정: 사라진 놉의 딸)

Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island (조선명탐정: 사라진 놉의 딸) is a 2015 South Korean period comedy-adventure film directed by Kim Sok-yun and the second entry in the Detective K series, following Detective K: Secret of the Virtuous Widow (2011). It stars Kim Myung-min as the self-styled genius detective Kim Min, Oh Dal-su as his partner Seopil, and Lee Yeon-hee as the mysterious Japanese woman Hisako.¹^•² Released on February 11, 2015 by Showbox, it sold 3,872,015 admissions in South Korea and finished ninth among Korean films at the 2015 domestic box office.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Korean title	조선명탐정: 사라진 놉의 딸 (Jo-seon-myeong-tamjeong: Nob-ui Ddal)¹
Release	February 11, 2015, South Korea; rated 12 and over; 124 minutes¹
Director and cast	Kim Sok-yun; Kim Myung-min (Kim Min), Oh Dal-su (Seopil), Lee Yeon-hee (Hisako)¹^•²
Production and distribution	Generation Blue Films (production); Showbox Corp (distribution and international sales)¹
Domestic box office	3,872,015 admissions; 30,456,879,428 won in gross on 811 screens³
Worldwide gross	$27,387,870, of which $27,202,503 came from South Korea⁵
Series position	Sequel to Detective K: Secret of the Virtuous Widow (2011), which drew 4.7 million admissions⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in 1795, the nineteenth year of King Jeongjo's reign, when a large amount of fake silver enters circulation and threatens the Joseon economy. Detective Kim Min, once the king's secret messenger, has been banished to a remote island for reasons the film leaves unclear. He escapes exile and, with his partner Seopil, investigates the ring behind the counterfeit silver scheme. In a rural village the pair meet a girl called Dahae, who asks them to find her missing sister; Dahae then disappears as well, and discolored, bluish corpses of village girls begin washing up on the shore. Kim Min discovers that these deaths are directly connected to the manufacturing operation for the counterfeit silver.¹^•⁷

The investigation leads the duo to Waegwan, the Japanese trading post where silver enters the country, and to Hisako, a Japanese woman whose connection to the counterfeit silver keeps the detectives off balance; Lee Yeon-hee plays the character in guises ranging from kimono to male disguise.⁸ Kim Min's character is written as a self-styled genius detective with a talent for inventions, and the sequel expands this comic device with gadgets including a Rubik's cube, a large hang glider that never flies successfully, and luminous pigment.⁹

Production and release

The film reunited director Kim Sok-yun with Kim Myung-min and Oh Dal-su four years after the first installment. Detective K: Secret of the Virtuous Widow had opened during the 2011 Lunar New Year season and drawn 4.7 million admissions, a result that directly shaped the sequel's scheduling for the same holiday window in 2015.⁶ At the production briefing in January 2015, Kim Myung-min said that if the film passed 5 million admissions he would make a sequel, framing the 5 million pledge as a promise of a next installment.¹⁰

Showbox released the film on February 11, 2015 on 811 screens nationwide, rated 12 and over.³ The Korean Film Council's database lists 825 screens for the release.¹

Box office

The film opened at the top of the Korean box office and held first place through its first weekend, edging out the Hollywood spy thriller Kingsman: The Secret Service, which had opened the same day; its first weekend ticket sales were 720,609 admissions worth 5.8 billion won.¹¹ By its third day it had accumulated 369,575 admissions.¹²

The Lunar New Year holiday drove the film's strongest run. According to the Korean Film Council's Integrated Ticket Sales Network, it sold 1,934,186 admissions during the five-day holiday from February 18 to 22, bringing its cumulative total to 3,141,289 at that point, with Kingsman running closely behind.⁶ It finished with 3,872,015 admissions and 30,456,879,428 won in gross, ranking ninth among 2015 Korean releases with a 3.5 percent share of the year's Korean-film box office.³^•⁴ Box Office Mojo records a South Korean gross of $27,202,503 and a worldwide total of $27,387,870, with a small international release adding $185,367.⁵ Its total admissions figure stood as the year's high for a Korean film until Northern Limit Line surpassed it later in 2015.¹³

Reception and festival screenings

Korean critics treated the film as a holiday entertainment vehicle built on the established Kim Min and Seopil double act. Reviewers noted that the sequel leans on the pair's comic banter, with the mystery elements subordinated to humor, and that the film succeeds on its own terms as a crowd-pleaser even where its plotting is loose.¹⁴^•¹⁵ At a press screening, Kim Myung-min was asked about similarities between his character and Sherlock Holmes and answered that the two could not be compared, arguing that the Joseon detective better carries Korean sensibilities.¹⁶

The film circulated internationally through festival screenings: the Panorama section of the Shanghai International Film & TV Festival in 2015, the Korean Film Festival in Singapore in 2015, and the Korean Film Festival in Hungary in 2016.¹ The Korean Cultural Service New York and Asia Society also screened it in their 2015 Korean Movie Night summer series.¹⁷ It later became available on Netflix.⁷

Series context

The Detective K films are a rare Korean example of a comedy franchise built on a recurring detective duo, and Kim Myung-min said in a 2015 interview that he hoped the series could become a genre of its own.¹⁸ A third installment, Detective K: Secret of the Bloodsucking Demon Mask, followed in 2018 with Kim Myung-min and Oh Dal-su returning.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026