Kingdom: Ashin of the North

The Ghost in the Joseon Snow

I’ve always been suspicious of prequels. They so often feel like autopsy reports—dissecting a corpse of a story to explain how it died, rather than letting the mystery of its life linger. Kingdom: Ashin of the North could have fallen into that trap. It’s a feature-length origin story for the zombie plague that ravages the Netflix series Kingdom, a show already praised for its "best zombie lore" (as one audience member on Letterboxd put it). But here’s the thing: Ashin doesn’t just explain the plague. It buries its roots in something far more human—vengeance, betrayal, and the quiet, devastating weight of a child’s grief.

The film opens with a shot of the northern wilderness, snow blanketing the ground like a shroud. A young girl, Ashin, moves through the trees, her breath visible in the cold air. There’s no dialogue, just the crunch of her footsteps and the distant howl of the wind. It’s a sequence that feels almost like a dream—or a memory. And in a way, it is. Because Ashin is a story about how the past refuses to stay buried.



Kim Seong-hun, the director, has a knack for blending the intimate with the apocalyptic. His previous work, A Hard Day, is a taut thriller about a corrupt cop covering up a hit-and-run, and it’s easy to see his fingerprints all over Ashin. The film’s tension isn’t just in the looming threat of the undead—though there are moments of genuine horror, like the scene where a character’s face is pressed against a window, their breath fogging the glass as something unseen claws at the other side. No, the real suspense comes from the way Seong-hun lets the camera linger on the faces of his characters, especially Gianna Jun’s Ashin. There’s a stillness to her performance that’s almost unnerving. She doesn’t emote in the way we expect from a protagonist driven by vengeance. Instead, her rage is coiled tight, a spring ready to snap. When it does, it’s devastating.