General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hot Blooded (뜨거운 피)

Hot Blooded (뜨거운 피) is a 2022 South Korean crime drama directed by Cheon Myeong-kwan, adapted from Kim Un-su's 2016 novel of the same title, and set in 1993 in a rundown port town on the outskirts of Busan, where a low-level gangster is pulled into a violent struggle for control of the local underworld.¹^•² It was the feature directing debut of Cheon, a novelist and screenwriter better known for his books, and it opened in South Korean theaters on March 23, 2022.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	뜨거운 피 (literally "Hot Blood")⁴
Director	Cheon Myeong-kwan, in his feature directing debut; he also wrote the screenplay¹^•³
Source	Kim Un-su's 2016 novel, roughly 600 pages²^•⁵
Cast	Jung Woo (Hee-su), Kim Kap-su (Elder Son), Choi Moo-sung (Yong-kang), Ji Seung-hyun (Chul-jin), Lee Hong-nae (Ah-mi), Yoon Ji-hye (In-sook)⁶
Release	March 23, 2022, South Korea; 119 minutes; rated 15³^•⁷
Box office	398,090 admissions and $2,765,169 gross on 1,279 screens (as of Sep 16, 2026)³
Festivals	New York Asian Film Festival 2022, July 15–31⁴

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The film takes place in 1993, in the aftermath of what Korean crime lore calls the "war on crime," a period when organized crime was being broken up. The setting is Kuam (구암), a fictitious derelict port town in the shadow of Busan on Korea's southern coast.²^•¹ Everything in the town, from work to money to manpower, revolves around the ManriJang hotel run by Elder Son (Old Man Son, 손영감), the long-unchallenged boss of Kuam.²

Hee-su's position. Hee-su (Jung Woo) has worked under Elder Son for two decades, acting as hotel manager and handling the boss's dirty work; by the story's start he is around forty and weary of a gangster life that has brought him nothing.¹^•² Hoping to leave the life and start a quieter existence with his long-term partner In-sook (Yoon Ji-hye) and her son, he tries to move into legitimate business.²^•⁸

The disruptors. Two forces upend this plan. Yong-kang (Choi Moo-sung), a drug-dealing gangster who had fled the country as a murder suspect, returns and begins causing trouble across town, and Hee-su must work to drive him out of the area.¹^•² At the same time, the Youngdo gang from the larger city, looking to swallow new territory after 1993, eyes Kuam, and its member Chul-jin (Ji Seung-hyun), Hee-su's oldest friend, approaches Hee-su secretly.²^•⁷ A gang war builds between the underworld factions, with Hee-su caught between double-crosses, and the film's Korean tagline, according to Cine21, reads "whoever hesitates loses" (누구든 망설이는 놈이 진다).⁷

Production and background

The film adapts Kim Un-su's novel almost wholesale, keeping most of its settings including the fictitious Kuam.² Kim is a novelist who debuted in 2002 through the Jinju News Fall Literary Contest with the short stories "Easy Breezy Writing Class" and "Dan Valjean Street."⁹

Cheon's background. Director and screenwriter Cheon Myeong-kwan first became known as a novelist, winning the Munhakdongne Novel Award with Whale (고래); his 2010 novel Boomerang Family was adapted into the 2013 film of the same name by director Song Hae-seong.²^•¹⁰ In the 1990s he had helped write Chang Gil-soo's I Wish What is Forbidden To Me (1994) and Kim Ui-seok's A Great Chinese Restaurant (1999), and more than two decades passed between those credits and his directing debut.⁸

The production was Kidari Studio's founding project, and lead actor Jung Woo said in an interview that the film had faced investment difficulties during shooting, in part because it was the young company's first production, the director's debut, and not a conventional commercial script.¹¹ Copyright is held by KidariStudio, Inc. and Whale Pictures; Studio DHl and Kidari Studio distributed it in Korea.⁶^•⁷

Release and box office

The film opened in South Korea on March 23, 2022, though the Korean Film Council's English-language news page listed a March 17 release date; the Korean Box Information System (KOBIS) and Cine21 record March 23.³^•⁷

Its commercial start was strong for a mid-budget genre film. According to the integrated cinema ticketing network, it drew 67,783 admissions on March 26 for a cumulative 158,139, and it had beaten the Choi Min-sik film The Strange Country's Mathematician at the daily box office from its first day, holding the number one position for four consecutive days.¹² KOBIS recorded a peak daily rank of 1 and cumulative totals of about 391,000 admissions and 3.737 billion won in revenue over 33 days.¹³ The Council's film database later listed total admissions of 398,090 and a gross of $2,765,169 across 1,279 screens.³

Internationally, the film screened in the New York Asian Film Festival 2022, which ran July 15 to 31.⁴

Reception

Reviewers disagreed about the result of compressing a long novel into two hours. The Korea Times' review called the film forgettable and full of neo-noir clichés, arguing that adapting Kim Un-su's 600-page book into only a few hours left it slow and cluttered with supporting-character tangents, though it credited the performances of Kim Kap-soo, Ji Seung-hyun, and Choi Mu-sung.¹⁴ The London Korean Film Festival's synopsis took a different view, calling it a first-rate gangster film whose labyrinthine plotting is held together by Jung Woo's performance as an accidental protagonist who is no hero.⁸ The New York festival program described it as combining gritty realism with cinematic panache.⁴

Korean-language criticism placed the film within the classic gangster noir tradition. A Cineplay review noted that Cheon deliberately avoided explaining his characters' motives or situating their actions against 1993 as an era, instead dropping the viewer into swirling events, and saw the film as an attempt to answer whether the old rules of the noir genre still work.² Director Cheon, at a press conference, described the film as differing from neo-noirs with suited, stylish gangsters, saying it touches on the survival of lonely and helpless people and, like ancient Greek tragedy, concerns the inescapability of destiny; he also highlighted its pseudo-family formations, with Elder Son as a father figure to Hee-su and Hee-su in turn a father figure to Ah-mi (Lee Hong-nae).¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2020–2022 films › Released in 2022

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

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