Like many of cinema’s best historical black comedies, Good News is based on fact. The Korean film follows the real-life 1970 hijacking of a Japanese aircraft by young members of a militant political organization called Red Army Faction. But viewers looking for a straightforward thriller chronicling the international incident will not find it here. Director and co-writer Byun Sung-hyun signals his satirical interests early, skipping an intense look at the start of the attack and focusing on an earplug-donning passenger who sleeps through the initial proclamation. Air Force One, this very intentionally is not.
“All the films that deal with an event like this one, there’s just so much detailed process of the hijacking part,” Byun tells TIME at the Busan International Film Festival, where Good News had its Asian premiere in September. “They all try to depict the tension in every detail. And I felt like we’ve seen too much of that already. I remember when I was writing the actual hijacking sequence, it almost felt like I was writing somebody else’s film. So that’s when I got to thinking, what if we just omit the process and then start from after that?”
The earplug scene is only one example of Good News deftly undercutting moments usually played for extreme drama in service of the film’s true focus: the harried, usually spineless middle management responses from multiple nations’ governments and agencies. This is where Good News takes the most historical liberties, fleshing out fictional characters and giving them agency in a story that is as much about the terrifying absurdities of the present political moment as it is about a decades-old plane hijacking.
“When I was writing the script and when we were shooting the film, I was quite exhausted, if not, felt a sense of almost hatred toward what I would constantly hear from the news,” says Byun. “I wanted to tell a story that wasn’t as straightforward or direct, and I wanted to create a character to…
