Opinion · Film & Psychology
A Korean thriller called The Assassins has done two things at once since its late-September release. It climbed to the top of South Korea’s box office, drawing more than 1.5 million viewers within days. And it became one of the most argued-about films in South Korea, accused by conservative politicians of rewriting one of the darkest days in modern Korean history.
Who is right about the history is a question for historians, archivists and, if it comes to that, courts. This piece asks a question that comes before it: why does a single film provoke such a fierce reaction, and is that reaction an overreaction? Psychology has a surprisingly clear answer. Films do not change history. But they are very good at changing how we remember it.
What is actually being discussed?
The film, directed by Hur Jin-ho and starring Yoo Hai-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho, is set around August 15, 1974, when First Lady Yuk Young-soo was fatally shot during a Liberation Day ceremony in Seoul. The official account concluded that the gunman, Mun Se-gwang, a Korean resident of Japan, acted in connection with North Korea. The film follows a reporter and investigators who chase the questions left over from the original investigation, and its characters raise the possibility of a different hand behind the shooting, one closer to the government of the day.
Lawmakers from the People Power Party called the film a distortion and a conspiracy theory, and some asked police to look into whether it defames the dead. The producers replied that the film “does not designate any specific individual as being behind the incident, nor does it present the hypotheses and setups in the drama as historical fact,” describing it as a work of cinematic imagination rather than a political statement. Audience scores split sharply along the same lines: according to Seoul Economic Daily, ratings from verified viewers averaged 8.4 out of 10, while open user ratings sat at 2.4.
Sources: Seoul Economic Daily, SBS News, Hankyung, Money Today
Why “it’s just a movie” doesn’t hold up
The producers’ defense sounds like common sense. Everyone who buys a ticket knows they are about to watch fiction. The problem is that our memory does not keep that label attached for very long.
In 2009, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, including Andrew Butler and Henry Roediger, published a study in Psychological Science that reads almost like a forecast of this controversy. Students read textbook-style passages on historical topics and watched clips from popular historical films. Some details in the clips matched the text; others contradicted it.
The good news came first. When the film agreed with the text, students remembered the material far better than with text alone, with recall improving by roughly 50 percent. Film is a powerful teacher. The bad news was the mirror image. When the film contradicted the text, students reproduced the film’s wrong version about half the time, even though they had just read the correct one. They were not careless readers. The scene simply won.
The most useful finding was about warnings. A general caution given before the clip, along the lines of “films sometimes take liberties with history,” did not prevent the false memories. What worked was a specific warning that named the exact detail the film was about to get wrong. According to the university’s summary of the study, that kind of targeted warning cancelled the effect. Vague skepticism did almost nothing; precise correction did nearly all the work.
Psychologists explain this with source memory. The brain is good at holding onto content and poor at holding onto where that content came from. A vivid scene survives; the note that says “this part was invented” fades. Years later, when someone thinks back to the 1974 shooting, they may not be able to tell whether an image came from an archive or from a screen. “It’s just a movie” is true inside the theater. In memory, it is often false.
Better films sink in deeper
Storytelling adds a second layer. Psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock described a state they called narrative transportation: the feeling of being pulled so deeply into a story that the real world recedes. Their research found that the more transported people are, the fewer counterarguments they generate and the more their beliefs shift toward the story’s world.
That creates an uncomfortable paradox. The better a historical film is made, with tight pacing, a strong score and actors who make you care, the less room the audience has to push back while watching. People are not persuaded by an argument; they simply never get a quiet moment to form an objection. Part of why this controversy is so heated may be that the film is not clumsy. A clumsy film would be easy to dismiss.
Big events seem to demand big causes
Why is the idea of a hidden hand so appealing in the first place? Researchers call it proportionality bias: the intuition that a large event must have a correspondingly large cause. When a nation’s first lady is shot at a public ceremony, “one man with a gun” can feel strangely insufficient. A larger conspiracy feels like it matches the weight of what happened, whether or not the evidence points that way.
This is not a Korean quirk. It is one of the most consistent findings in the psychology of conspiracy beliefs, and it helps explain why some assassinations remain contested for generations while smaller crimes do not.
Two earlier cases, two different outcomes
The most famous parallel is Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). The film challenged the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was attacked by many historians and journalists for blending documented fact with speculation. It was also a hit. The public pressure that followed helped push Congress to pass the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, which required the release of government files on the case. The film did not rewrite the history of the assassination. It did change what the public demanded to know about it.
A quieter case comes from the UK. As The Crown moved closer to living memory, critics argued that viewers, especially younger ones who had not lived through the events, were treating its invented private conversations as fact. In 2020, the UK’s then culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, asked Netflix to label the show as fiction. Netflix declined to add on-screen warnings, pointing out that it already called the series a dramatization in its own materials. Two years later, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II and a public letter from Dame Judi Dench criticizing the show’s “crude sensationalism,” Netflix added a line to the YouTube description of the fifth season’s trailer calling it a “fictional dramatisation” inspired by real events.
Notice what that disclaimer is, in light of the Washington University study. It is a general warning, placed in a spot many viewers will never read. The research suggests it would do little to stop a vivid invented scene from becoming someone’s memory of what happened. The fight over the label was real; its protective power was probably small.
Labels are now a question for how films are made, too. When Ben Affleck admitted his film Animals used AI but wouldn’t say where, the missing label became the story, which I looked at in why hidden AI feels like a betrayal.
The conditions differ: a conspiracy thriller in 1990s America, a prestige royal drama on a global streaming service, and now a Korean mystery about a 1974 shooting. The structure is the same. A well-made drama touches an event that still carries emotional and political weight. Viewers absorb the story faster than they absorb the caveats. And the argument that follows is less about the film than about who gets to shape shared memory.
Same film, opposite verdicts
The most striking feature of this controversy is that the same two hours of film are being judged in completely opposite ways. One side sees an obvious distortion. The other sees a legitimate question about an old case. The 8.4-versus-2.4 rating split is almost a textbook illustration.
In 1985, Stanford researchers Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students identical news coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre. Both groups concluded that the coverage was biased against their own side. The researchers called this the hostile media effect. People do not start from the evidence and arrive at a position; they start from a position and read the evidence through it.
If you want to predict how someone will rate The Assassins, their political leaning may tell you more than any scene in the film. That does not mean the criticism is wrong, or that the defense is right. It means that the reaction itself is weak evidence either way.
Why controversy sells tickets
There is also a reason the backlash and the box office are rising together. When people are told a film should not be watched, many feel their freedom to choose is being squeezed, and they respond by wanting to see it more. Psychologists call this reactance. Add plain curiosity, “what exactly is so bad about it?”, and a controversy becomes free advertising that no marketing budget could buy.
Pressure can backfire the same way far from the cinema. A recent study on meat-shaming found that scolding people about what they eat rarely changes their minds, and that direct messages sting the most, as I wrote in does meat-shaming work?
The irony runs deeper. Every article and speech written to refute the film’s hypothesis also repeats that hypothesis to a new audience. In 1977, Lynn Hasher and her colleagues found that people rate statements they have heard several times as more likely to be true than statements they have heard once. This is the illusory truth effect. Repetition breeds familiarity, and familiarity is easily mistaken for credibility. A claim repeated in order to be rejected can end up feeling more familiar, and familiar things feel true. Critics cannot fully escape this paradox, and neither can the coverage of it, including this article.
So what should we do with films like this?
None of this means historical dramas should not be made. Film is one of the few forms that can pull a half-forgotten event back into public conversation and make a new generation care about it. JFK is a reminder that renewed attention can even lead to more transparency, not less. And official accounts, in many countries, have occasionally been revised when new records surfaced. Asking questions about the past is not the problem.
But the same psychology cuts in both directions. A film that raises a question is not the same as a record that answers it, and our memory is bad at keeping the two apart. The people most confident that a film has “exposed the truth” and the people most confident it has “spread a lie” are often reacting to the same thing: how vivid the story felt, not how strong the evidence is.
The problem is not the film. It is the habit of letting a film be the last thing we learn about an event. The research points to a practical answer. General suspicion does not protect memory; specific checking does. The correction that works is not “be careful, movies lie” but “this particular scene did not happen this way, and here is the record.”
So when the credits roll on a film like this, it is worth asking yourself one question: is the scene I am remembering right now from the record, or from the screen? That single question is the line between enjoying a film and handing your memory over to it.
Editorial note: This article discusses the psychology of how historical films shape public memory. It does not take a position on the unresolved political dispute over the film or on the historical findings of the 1974 case. The featured image is an AI-generated illustration.