When she has shot all of those, she reaches a new level – where colourful fat guys with no shirts take her on with knives. The acrobatic camerawork of this first few minutes is hard to believe. The camera swings in and out of places it seems impossible to go – which suggests some, maybe a lot, of it is CGI. It's so fast it's hard to tell.

This kind of ultra-violence seems very Korean. In the past 20 years, as their cinema has become more influential, it has also become more extreme. It's not hard to read The Villainess as a series of metaphors about the country that has never quite recovered from the civil war of the 1950s.

A woman cradling her dying husband and child on a road, shrieking to the heavens – this could be an image from that war. The pain in Korean films always seems to lead back to this conflict – hardly surprising, given it tore the country in two.

We also see this in the convoluted plot, in which spying, double-dealing and infiltration are the norm. Did I say convoluted? That's too soft a word for this plot. I suspect not even the writers could explain it.

Sook-hee (played as an adult by the talented Kim Ok-bin) is recruited by the Korean Intelligence agency. She's already a killer. Having witnessed her father's death she has been adopted into a criminal gang led by the charismatic Joong-sang (Shin Ha-kyun).