Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
May, 1980. Man-seob is a taxi driver in Seoul who lives from hand to mouth, raising his young daughter alone. One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who will pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city. Not knowing that he’s a German journalist with a hidden agenda, Man-seob takes the job.
A Taxi Driver is a deeply moving historical drama based on the true story of the Gwangju Uprising. The plot is exceptionally well-constructed, using the everyman taxi driver as a vessel to bring the audience into the horror and humanity of the 1980 massacre — the dramatic escalation from comedic fish-out-of-water setup to gut-wrenching tragedy is masterfully paced. Song Kang-ho delivers one of his finest performances, conveying a full arc of self-interest giving way to conscience and courage; Thomas Kretschmann is also convincing as the German journalist. Cinematography is competent and occasionally striking but largely functional — it serves the story without distinguishing itself visually. Novelty is solid but not exceptional; the premise of a witness-through-an-outsider framing a historical atrocity is familiar in Korean cinema, and the film follows recognizable genre beats. The ending is emotionally satisfying and appropriately bittersweet — the real-life postscript adds genuine weight — but it leans on sentiment rather than doing anything formally surprising.