The Killer

Framing heroes and killers in John Woo’s intimate reflection of violence…

The opening credits unfold over a church on a rainy day. Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat), a professional killer, sits in silence before the face of the Virgin Mary, and accepts his next contract. Then, on the notes of Jenny (Sally Yeh)’s song, he walks in a pristine, unhurried appearance into the nightclub where the job will be done. And then the music stops. Without warning we are thrown headfirst into John Woo’s world: face to face with the choreographed violence of a Hong Kong that has no mercy for anyone.

Released in 1989, The Killer arrived at a particular crossroads, both for Hong Kong cinema and for Woo himself. The heroic bloodshed genre, which Woo had helped define with A Better Tomorrow I and II, was reaching its emotional and aesthetic apex. To deliver this film, Woo attempted to push the genre further still — toward something that could contain, without contradiction, both the ecstasy of balletic violence and the grammar of classical tragedy.

And so the story begins, as so many tragedies do, with an accident. Ah Jong inadvertently blinds the singer Jenny during a hit gone wrong in the nightclub. It is an abrupt moment in the choreography of carnage, and yet it becomes the film’s entire moral engine. Guilt, in Woo’s universe, is not a burden that paralyses; it is a compass. From this point forward, every choice Ah Jong makes is a form of penance that gradually reveals itself as something closer to transformation. There is a phrase in the extended cut, pronounced by Inspector Lee (Danny Lee), that resonates with the core of the film: “There is something heroic about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes so calm. He acts like he has a dream; eyes full of passion, full of empathy.” Ah Jong is not interesting because of what he does, but because of what he carries inside while doing it.

Throughout the whole film there are only two characters that understand him: Jenny, who through blindness alone can see love, and Inspector Lee, who finds in Ah Jong the only mirror his own code of honour can recognise. What begins as a cat-and-mouse pursuit gradually reveals itself as something far more complex: a recognition between two men who operate by the same moral logic, even if they occupy opposite sides of the law. This is Woo’s modern interpretation of xiongdi (兄弟, sworn brotherhood), stripped of its historical formality but not of its chivalric emotional weight. Ah Jong and Lee are not childhood friends or gang initiates; they are strangers who discover, through conflict, that they are the same kind of man: loyal, honourable, and increasingly obsolete in the world they inhabit. The institutions around them — triads and police force alike — are corrupt and almost unrecognisable one from another. The bond between these two men becomes the only reliable moral structure the film has to offer.

This duality is encoded even in the original title: 喋血雙雄, translated as The Two Bloody Heroes. The film’s real subject is not a killer, but a pair of heroes; and the tragedy is that the world they live in will not allow them to be what they are to each other. Here there is also the underlying theme of the genderless love and respect for each other that transcend every romantic representation. And so the line “I believe in justice. It’s a shame nobody trusts me,” echoes in the memory long after the credits roll. There is something quietly devastating about Woo’s insistence on this theme. In a Hong Kong on the cusp of enormous political uncertainty (1989 is not an incidental year), the idea that true allegiance is personal rather than institutional carries a particular resonance. The xiongdi bond survives precisely because it refuses to belong to any system.

Alongside this, and inseparable from it, is the love story. Jenny’s blindness is the film’s central metaphor: she sees Ah Jong with a clarity that no sighted person achieves. Their relationship is built on a concealed identity and sustained by guilt, and it is beautiful precisely because those feelings, over the course of the film, transform Ah Jong from the inside. Woo does not offer redemption through love in any conventional sense; what Jenny offers Ah Jong is something quieter and more devastating: witness. He is seen. And in a film populated by men who kill in the dark, to be truly seen is almost unbearable.

In this landscape, the camera acts as moral language, building a poetry in violence. What distinguishes The Killer from its peers is not its action sequences — extraordinary as they are — but the way Woo and cinematographer Peter Pau deploy the camera as an instrument of emotional amplification. Slow motion here does not function as mere spectacle; its role is closer to elegy. When bodies fall, time dilates, as though the film itself is reluctant to let go. The viewer is not permitted the clean catharsis of fast-cut violence but is forced to keep their eyes still and witness. The camera places characters in the centre of the frame, not as a compositional habit but as a statement: look through them, look inside.

The actors are almost performing with their souls. Chow Yun-fat, formed by years of melodrama and television, does not need martial arts training to make this role work. His Ah Jong is an achievement of interiority: a man who contains catastrophe behind perfectly still eyes. It is, for me, arguably the finest performance of his career.

The white doves that recur throughout the film, perched in the church and scattering across gunfights, carry the full weight of this contradiction: peace and death occupying the same frame, the same instance. And the church itself, returning at the beginning and end, closes the narrative circle: a confessional, a sanctuary, and ultimately a site of reckoning. Sacred geometry in a profane world.

Lowell Lo’s score does not underline the film’s emotions so much as breathe alongside them. The recurring themes — melancholic, spare, occasionally lush — mirror the film’s circular structure, returning the listener to familiar emotional territory just as the narrative closes the loop. Crucially, Lo and Woo understand the power of silence. There are moments in The Killer where the music withdraws entirely, and the violence that fills the space becomes almost unbearable in its nakedness. The contrast is not accidental, and it represents a notably different relationship with sound compared to Woo’s earlier work. The interplay between score and slow motion is where the film’s emotional investment is most fully realised.

Although The Killer is an open love letter to Jean-Pierre Melville and Scorsese, Woo moved well beyond straightforward homage. The subjectivity of the gaze is entirely his own. With this film Woo reached the full potential of a style he had been building since A Better Tomorrow; one he would continue to develop and push further with Bullet in the Head, Hard Boiled and beyond. But this is the moment of crystallisation: every element in perfect tension, nothing in excess. It is also the film that carried his name beyond Hong Kong, the work that introduced international audiences to the heroic bloodshed genre and legitimised Woo as a filmmaker of genuine vision.

And yet what remains, long after the genre conversation fades, is the killer dying alone, unable to reach the hand of his lover; and the cop left standing in front of hollow-revealed institutions, with no choice left but to become the new killer; alone, at last. “Good people are often misunderstood“, and in Woo’s Hong Kong, that is the only epitaph on offer.

The Killer is available as a limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Arrow Video, and as a limited edition hardbox 4K UHD + Blu-ray SteelBook with hardcover booklet from Imprint Films.

About the author

Sara Domenicano
Sara is MA student researching Chinese culture, history and society through cinema; but in her heart she has a soft spot for ghost stories and low budget martial art period pieces.
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