This 2018 Korean action crime thriller, “Believer” (Original title: “Dokjeon”), now streaming on Netflix, is a twisty-turvy story with a large ensemble but centered on two unlikely partners—emotional cop Won-Ho and shifty low-level drug enforcer Seo Young-Rak—who find themselves teaming up to bring down a big drug cartel led by the mysterious Mr. Lee.
Believer (Dokjeon, 2018) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Won-Ho’s attempts to learn about the mysterious Mr. Lee, through his informer—Soo-Jeong, a troubled teenage kid who finds herself working for one of the gangs—decode how new drugs are finding themselves proliferating in Seoul. His attempts at expediting the process get a gut punch when Soo-Jeong is found at a terrace parking lot, gruesomely inflicted by a knife. Won-Ho’s attempts to admit her to a hospital would be too late, but before she dies, she scratches a logo on a receipt before dying, which would reveal the identity of the man down the line.
A couple of days later, a tough and no-nonsense woman, dressed in a business suit and identifying herself as Oh Yeon-ok, Mr. Lee’s right-hand woman, surrenders willingly to Won-ho and the police department. She had apparently escaped death by a whisker while visiting one of the drug labs and believes that the explosion had been intended to wipe her out. While outwardly cooperative, she also isn’t reticent to give everything up without expecting a few luxuries in return, much to the chagrin of Won-Ho’s subordinates, who had to bring in lunch for her. However, as Yeon-ok finishes her lunch, she ingests her heart medicines intended for her and collapses on her lunch bowl. Won-Ho and the team are left scratching their heads, realizing that her driver, who worked for Mr. Lee, had been instructed to kill her by replacing her medicines with poison.
Meanwhile, at the exploded drug lab, the police find a survivor and his dog. The survivor, admitted to the hospital, tries to escape to search for his mother (later revealed to have been working at the lab, which used to be their greenhouse, and died in the explosion) and is caught in the process. The dog (named Jindo dog, even though it actually isn’t one), on the other hand, while extremely injured, is kept alive just about enough to be treated and left alone to convalesce. The survivor is named Seo Young-Rak, and upon learning of the death of his mother and the critical condition of his dog, he decides to team up with Won-ho and the police department in bringing down the cartel and Mr. Lee.
Easier said than done, because being a low-level drug dealer entails Rak having not actually met Mr. Lee. But one has to start somewhere to figure out if it was Mr. Lee or one of his numerous impersonators who had blown up a high-rise building and murdered the CEO of a rival pharmaceutical company. The idea thus is for Won-Ho to impersonate Park’s superior—the henchman named Park Chan-Sung—and close the deal with the eccentric supplier Ha-Rim. The reason for executing such a risky plan is Ha-Rim’s condition of shaking the famed Mr. Lee’s hand as the “handshake deal.”
Thus that part of the plan was being executed, with its own set of complications—an eccentric drug lord with an even more eccentric girlfriend, an effort to convince them that the fake drugs the two were carrying were the real “Laika” drug with its weighty texture, the girlfriend destroying the clip-on in the tie carrying the hidden camera by dropping it in a wine glass—the wrinkle occurs when the actual Park shows up at the same hotel.
Waiting until Ha-Rim and his girlfriend retire to their room for a drug-fueled sexual shenanigan, Won-ho rushes to another hotel room where he disguises himself as Ha-Rim (keep in mind neither Park nor Ha-Rim had met each other, Rak being their only connective tissue), meets with Park, and begins to act like Ha-Rim to the point of replicating his body language.
However, as much as Won-Ho could pretend to be a drug-fueled drug lord, he would have an adverse reaction to snorting actual drugs up his nostrils. He manages to scare Park enough to ensure Won-ho is the real Ha-Rim, but collapses as soon as he retreats to the other room. He would have to be immersed in ice-cold water to actually break over the reaction to his body ODing, but that didn’t stop Won-ho from actually hallucinating the dead Soo-Jeung sobbing and screaming to his face.
Once the raw materials from Ha-Rim had been obtained, Rak takes the team to two mute drug-makers, while Won-ho, hiding in a stakeout van, would act as the audience surrogate in understanding the ASL between Rak and the two cooks. It’s fascinating how this entire section also works as an entry into Rak’s personality as a character, especially the sequence where he stops the feasting to mourn for his mother, and the two cooks actually help him tide over his grief, revealing a past between them that defies explanation.
However, it doesn’t change the nagging distrust Won-Ho has over Park, especially considering how easily Rak had agreed to help him. By the time the cooking of the drug was already underway, Won-Ho discovered a discrepancy in Rak’s identity with respect to the pictures obtained from Rak’s school. Rak finally reveals that he had been adopted, his parents having discovered him hiding behind the crates of raw materials. The untimely death of their actual son led to them adopting him and easily passing him off as their own, even though the existential question of who he is lingers heavily upon Rak.
Those questions had to wait as a new player entered the fray. Park, in an unprecedented move, brings his boss to the lab, who is revealed to be a man named Brian. Brian, clearly distrustful of Park and not pleased with the recent events, instructs Park to essentially dismiss him. The next morning, however, the domino effect completely puts all respective plans into a haywire. Ha-Rim’s girlfriend locates Rak and kidnaps both him and Won-Ho, along with the newly manufactured Laika drug. Meanwhile, Brian, clearly pissed at Park’s audacity to attempt to force Brian to meet him and Rak in person, essentially reveals his face, thrashes Park to a near inch of his life.
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The kidnapped Won-ho and Rak both find themselves in a precarious position at gunpoint. A prolonged violent fight ensues, with Won-ho barely managing to get an upper hand on the drug-crazed, machine-gun-toting Ha-Rim and finally managing to get out of Ha-Rim’s clutches due to Rak shooting him square in the head. Meanwhile, back at the drug site, upon realizing that Rak and Won-Ho had been kidnapped, two of Won-Ho’s team members break through the lab, only for one to be killed and the other severely injured by the booby traps set by the two mute cooks. Upon learning of this news, Won-Ho is severely shocked and almost ready to plummet Rak, but stops because they have come too far to go back now. Instead, resuming their ploy as Ha-rim and Rak, they go to meet Park and his boss, Brian.
Brian, still distrustful of Rak, orders Park to take him aside, whereby Park plans to torture and kill Rak. Meanwhile, Won-Ho confronts Brian, who is revealed to be the son of the rival pharmaceutical CEO and who had orchestrated this entire plan from the beginning. He is the man whom Won-Ho’s informer had been signalling about before her death and whom Won-Ho had suspected while running a search.
And as it turns out, he is Mr. Lee, who was responsible for the destruction of the lab and the death of Rak’s mother. Or is he? Even as a shootout occurs, once a severed hand with a phone stuck on it comes into the meeting place, things begin to somewhat fall into place, as in the ensuing fight, Won-ho is injured in the shoulder, and Brian is kidnapped.
Believer (Dokjeon, 2018) Movie Ending Explained:
Who is the real Mr. Lee?
The gag covering Brian’s face is lifted, revealing him to be tied up and held hostage by none other than Rak, who then reveals himself to be Mr. Lee. The shadowy leader of the drug cartel is, of course, angry, not just because of Brian’s audacity to impersonate Rak’s nom de guerre and, by that token, his inadvertent attempt to take over the business, but also because in that process he causes an explosion at the lab that leads to the death of his adopted mother and his dog being severely hurt. And Mr. Lee can’t have that. Instructing his two mute cooks, he burns Brian, replicating the injuries of his dog on the back, and leaves his scarred body at the airport.
Does Won-Oh figure out Lee’s identity?
Even as the relationship between Rak and Won-Oh is mingled with distrust and chemistry, Oh still couldn’t understand the death of Brian. Considering how long he had been searching for Mr. Lee, Brian being the mysterious kingpin wasn’t sitting right with him. However, it was upon realizing, then rushing to where Rak’s dog is kept, and finding it missing, that his suspicions were reinforced. He had figured out that Rak had named his dog Laika, after the drug he had been instrumental in preparing, proving Rak as the elusive Mr. Lee.
But even as Won-Oh is cognizant of that, it is too late. Brian had already confessed to the identity, and the fact that the mysterious drug lord had been working with the police right under their noses to essentially extract a personal vendetta would lead to the police becoming a laughingstock, and Won-Oh’s superior would not have that.
Thus, Won-Oh, for all intents and purposes, goes rogue. He essentially tracks down where Lee and the mute cooks had been hiding by having inserted a GPS tracker within Laika, a move that is softly criticized by Rak/Lee but proves that Won-Ho had known this secret for a while but had gone along with the subterfuge. It’s interesting the dilemma that Won-Oh finds himself in—having to confront a man who is, for all intents and purposes, himself, unaware of his own identity. Having seen his parents overdose on drugs while being transported behind a shipping container, and then being adopted and forced into a life of drugs anyway, it seems Rak had a piercing need for control that would lead him to create this cartel. In Won-Ho, he perhaps recognized that similar hunger, but perhaps for different ends.
As the movie begins to reach the finish line, the two sit down for coffee. For official purposes, Mr. Lee is dead, Rak having committed the perfect crime. But as the camera pans slowly away, a gunshot pierces the air, but we never learn who fired the shot. There is a possibility of an answer in the 2023 sequel (“Believer 2”). The ambiguity helps precisely because it depends on the viewer’s connection with Won-Ho and Rak, and that would affect whether they want Rak to survive or die for his crimes, and vice versa for Won-Ho. Truthfully, I want to remain in this Schrodinger’s house scenario rather than be given a definitive answer.
The extended cut of the movie and the 2023 sequel, however, reveal a bloody Won-Ho walking out of the house, thus revealing Rak to be killed.
