Ballerina—A neon‑soaked revenge odyssey that turns grief into ruthless grace
Introduction
I pressed play expecting a stylish thrill ride, and instead found myself clutching my chest as a single note—“Please get revenge for me”—rearranged a woman’s entire life. Have you ever lost someone and felt the world demand you either look away or look for a fight? In Ballerina, a former bodyguard named Ok‑ju chooses the fight, and every frame insists we feel the heat of that choice on our skin. It’s a 2023 South Korean action thriller from director Lee Chung‑hyun, led by Jeon Jong‑seo’s ferocious, tender performance, and it streams on Netflix with a lean 93‑minute runtime that never lets go. The film’s stylized neon, thumping tracks, and sinuous camerawork aren’t just cool—they’re the pulse of a promise kept. I kept asking myself: if a friend’s last wish landed in my hands, would I be brave—or brutal—enough to honor it?
Overview
Title: Ballerina (발레리나)
Year: 2023
Genre: Action, Thriller, Revenge Drama
Main Cast: Jeon Jong‑seo, Kim Ji‑hoon, Park Yu‑rim
Runtime: 93 minutes
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Director: Lee Chung‑hyun
Overall Story
Ok‑ju moves through Seoul like a shadow that used to belong to the sun. A former VIP bodyguard, she has the reflexes of a pro and the heart of someone who once believed in guardrails. Then an old friend, Min‑hee, reenters her life like a soft light—brief, warming, and gone too soon. When Ok‑ju finds Min‑hee dead and opens a gift box holding ballet shoes and a short, devastating message, she doesn’t just grieve; she recalibrates her purpose. The city’s hum lowers to a growl. Revenge isn’t a fantasy here—it’s a map, and Ok‑ju starts tracing it from the first tear to the first target.
She begins with patience, not punches. Ok‑ju studies the man behind Min‑hee’s terror: Choi Pro, a slick predator who sells pleasure and poison with the same smile. She tracks his routines, memorizes his entrances and exits, and bugs his immaculate home until it sings like a canary. In a drawer of labeled USBs—each a life wrecked, indexed—she finds the one tagged “ballerina,” and the screen confirms the horror Min‑hee never stopped living. Have you ever clicked a file you wish you could unsee? Ok‑ju watches, cries without sound, and then decides: if the system won’t provide identity theft protection for women whose very bodies are stolen, she will.
The hunt’s first major play is social, not violent. Ok‑ju meets Choi in a club called Heaven, where basslines blur boundaries and predators pretend to be VIPs. She lets him believe he’s winning: a drink, a flirt, a drive to a hotel that’s more trap than suite. When he tries to drug her, she flips the script, revealing the precision that used to keep CEOs alive and will now end a criminal’s career. The fight leaves dents in glass and pride; hotel staff swarm; Ok‑ju escapes with the help of a terrified high‑schooler kept there like inventory. They flee in Choi’s Lamborghini—a bright animal roaring through the night—proof that the hunted just became the hunter.
The blowback is immediate. Choi’s organization, which peddles drugs and women, doesn’t appreciate freelance depravity or sloppiness; even evil has rules, and he’s violated them. He’s ordered to fix his mess in three days, so he recruits a pharmacist to help track Ok‑ju, dangling obscene money like a cure. Meanwhile, Ok‑ju arms up through old contacts, prepping her apartment with the calm, layered logic you’d expect from someone who could consult on home security systems in another life. When Choi and the pharmacist come calling, the walls groan under the stress of survival, and Ok‑ju’s training buys her the narrowest window out the back. Survival here isn’t heroic; it’s pragmatic, grim, and utterly necessary.
Ok‑ju circles the hotel again and shakes loose a thread that leads to the gang’s base of operations—a gleaming, rotten hive. She enters quiet and leaves crimson, her path a choreography of inevitability. No one will say where the captive student is, or where Choi has crawled to hide. The fights land hard: blades hiss, slugs punch drywall, and the camera glides as if it, too, is out of breath. There is no gloating, only momentum. The story keeps reminding us that grief is a marathon with sprints of rage.
Choi tries to rewrite reality, reporting to his boss that Ok‑ju is dead and buried. He doesn’t realize the dead sometimes run faster than the living. When he and the pharmacist cross paths with the student and Ok‑ju again, greed turns on itself; the bounty promised for Ok‑ju’s death puts a price tag on loyalty. Shots crack open the night. The student—a survivor refusing to be written out—interrupts the execution long enough for Ok‑ju to steady, aim, and answer the note she received with bullets.
The final act is as simple as it is savage. Ok‑ju and the student take Choi to a beach, the soundtrack dropping to a heartbeat as waves keep time with justice. Fire doesn’t argue; it concludes. The image of a pyre against the sea isn’t just spectacle—it’s a cleansing, a ritual performed for all the names we never learned from those USBs. Back in Choi’s home, Ok‑ju gathers the drives and finds a client ledger, each line an indictment. She drives off with evidence and silence, because some endings don’t require applause—only relief.
Folded into the film’s speed is a social ache you can’t ignore. The world Ok‑ju storms—human trafficking rings, digital blackmail, voyeuristic “content”—echoes real cases that rattled South Korea, including the Nth room scandal. Director Lee Chung‑hyun has said he wanted to deliver a sense of justice that reality hasn’t fully provided, and Ballerina stages that wish with operatic focus. The result is catharsis without pretending to be cure. Have you ever wanted a movie to promise safety the way travel insurance promises help when everything goes wrong? This one doesn’t promise; it avenges.
What keeps the story from collapsing into pure brutality is the friendship at its core. Min‑hee isn’t on screen much, but every memory of her—every ballet step, every laugh—holds the frame like a hand on Ok‑ju’s back. Jeon Jong‑seo plays Ok‑ju as a woman who knows how to fall without breaking and how to love without saying it out loud. The camera often isolates her, then floods her with color, as if emotions are lighting cues. When she fights, it’s not rage alone—it’s the ache of what might have been if cruelty hadn’t entered the room. That ache keeps the film human, even when the knives flash.
And then there’s the craft: Gray’s music works like an adrenaline IV, the color palette paints neon halos around sin, and the choreography never wastes a movement. The runtime stays taut, the pacing accelerates between watchful stalking and sudden, combustible violence, and Seoul becomes a character—beautiful, transactional, and awake at all hours. If you’re sensitive to stylized violence, you’ll still find that the film’s empathy never leaves the frame. It’s a dance of grief, and every spin lands where it should. By the end, I felt strangely lighter, as if someone had returned a small piece of justice to the ledger.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The Pink Shoe Box: Ok‑ju opens a beautifully wrapped package to find Min‑hee’s ballet shoes and a short, seismic note. The elegance of the gift clashes with the violence behind it, and the room seems to tilt. You can almost hear Ok‑ju’s heartbeat jump to a new rhythm—a mission tempo. It’s the moment where grief gains agency, and watching her face change is like watching a storm choose a coastline. The scene sets the film’s emotional key: beauty weaponized by love.
The USB Drawer of Nightmares: In Choi’s pristine home, Ok‑ju finds a drawer of labeled drives—a bureaucrat’s idea of evil. One is marked “ballerina,” and the footage confirms everything she feared. The camera doesn’t leer; it indicts. Ok‑ju doesn’t break; she hardens. If you’ve ever wished for a world where predators leave audit trails, this is the closest thing to paperwork heaven offers. It’s also the point of no return.
Heaven Isn’t: The nightclub called Heaven hums with bass and bad intentions. Ok‑ju plays along, letting Choi believe the evening belongs to him. The faces around them blur as if the club itself refuses to witness what’s coming. A flirt becomes a trapdoor; a drink becomes a signal. When they head to the hotel, the movie slides into a slow grin—now the hunter gets a name and a face.
The Hotel Ambush: Choi’s drugging routine hits a wall named Ok‑ju. She feigns weakness, then detonates the room with precision strikes, turning furniture into obstacles and cameras into evidence. The arrival of complicit staff ups the chaos, but a high‑school captive cracks the door to escape and a path to alliance. They blast into the night in a stolen Lamborghini that screams like freedom. It’s the first time the film lets us breathe—and even then, only in gulps.
The Compound Bloodbath: Ok‑ju locates the gang’s nest and walks through it like winter through a garden. The fights feel like decisions, not flourishes; every move answers a question: Who gets to keep breathing? The camera glides, the color saturates, and the bodies stop lying. It’s horrifying and honest, a purge of a system that counts women as inventory. She leaves with fewer questions and more resolve.
The Beach Pyre: Justice, fire, and surf—no metaphors required. Choi’s final scene is stripped of wit and swagger; the tide takes what’s left of his power. The student stands with Ok‑ju, not as a sidekick but as a survivor, and the flames reflect in eyes that have seen too much. When the smoke thins, the city seems a fraction safer. Ok‑ju’s task isn’t finished, but the promise is kept.
Memorable Lines
“You know my friend? The one who does ballet? She died.” – Ok‑ju, opening the door to grief without softening it It’s a line that lands like a diagnosis—short, clinical, and irreversible. Ok‑ju’s voiceover acknowledges loss before it straps on vengeance, and the simplicity makes it sting. In a film drenched in style, this bare sentence reminds us why style exists here at all: to deliver an emotional payload. It also sets up Min‑hee not as a plot device, but as the beating heart worth fighting for.
“Please get revenge for me!” – Min‑hee’s final message, handwritten like a bruise The exclamation point is the most honest mark in the movie—it refuses to whisper. Many revenge films invent a mission; this one receives it, and the consent matters. The note transforms Ok‑ju’s private sorrow into public action, turning memory into marching orders. From here on, the film treats revenge as a duty borne of love, not spectacle.
“There’s something I need to do… Something like hunting.” – Ok‑ju, naming her grief a skill set Calling it “hunting” reframes revenge from chaos into craft. It tells us she’ll track, plan, and minimize collateral damage, the way a professional thinks. The line also hints at how predators will feel the prey’s terror boomerang back. Have you ever felt your purpose click into place like a round in a chamber? That’s this sentence.
“I’ll hunt you down all the way to hell.” – Ok‑ju, promising distance won’t save the guilty It’s operatic without being empty; by this point, we believe she will. The phrasing underlines the film’s theology: heaven is marketing, hell is a location, and love is a GPS that doesn’t lose signal. The line reverberates through every chase and every cut. When the beach finally burns, we realize she meant every syllable.
“Don’t you remember me? It’s me. The ballerina.” – Ok‑ju, weaponizing a nickname into a verdict The reclaiming of “ballerina” flips shame into identity. It’s not just Min‑hee’s art—it’s their bond, their shared language, and the last word Choi deserves to hear. In a story about images used to harm, words become tools to restore agency. She names herself, and then she ends it.
Why It's Special
“Ballerina” opens like a bruise blooming under neon light and never stops throbbing. A tight, 93‑minute revenge tale set in Seoul’s after‑hours underworld, it follows a former bodyguard who answers her best friend’s last request: make the bad men pay. If you’re curious where to watch it right now, it’s streaming globally on Netflix, where it premiered on October 6, 2023. Have you ever felt that sudden rush when grief and love collide? This film lives in that split second.
What makes “Ballerina” sing isn’t just its blade‑clean action, but the ache at its core: the bond between Ok‑ju and Min‑hee. Memory fragments flicker like streetlights—photos, voice notes, small gestures—and together they stitch a reason for every punch thrown. The movie says, “I miss you,” in the universal language of doing something about it. Have you ever needed closure so badly that your body moved before your mind did?
Director Lee Chung‑hyun steers the story with a fairy‑tale‑meets‑nightmare sensibility, crafting a world that is as pretty as it is perilous. He leans into painterly frames and bold color blocks, letting violence pirouette through compositions that feel strangely tender. GRAY’s electronic score guides these shifts—warm piano for friendship, darker pulses for the hunt—so the emotion lands before the dialogue does.
The first big set piece—a cramped convenience store where canned fruit becomes a weapon—announces the film’s personality: balletic, brutal, a little mischievous. From there, “Ballerina” escalates in rooms of glass and chrome, where silence is a fuse and every footstep sounds like a countdown. You don’t watch the choreography so much as you feel it whiplash across your nerves.
Underneath the style is a deliberately spare script. Lee pares dialogue down to the muscle, making space for looks and choices to carry the weight. That restraint sometimes reads like a fable told with knives—simple on paper, unsettling in the mouth. It’s a choice that keeps the movie lean and keeps you leaning forward.
There’s also a moral bruise the film presses on: the rage that follows real‑world crimes against women, and the fantasy of finally getting justice. Lee has said he wanted to deliver a sense of resolution audiences didn’t always get in life; that intent hums through every confrontation Ok‑ju walks into. Have you ever wanted a story to say what you couldn’t? This one tries.
Finally, “Ballerina” is a mood as much as a movie: neon‑noir revenge threaded with sisterhood, all in a brisk runtime that fits a weeknight watch without skimping on impact. You come for the aesthetic, you stay for the feeling, and you leave with your pulse hammering.
Popularity & Reception
“Ballerina” didn’t just drop—it detonated. In its debut week (October 9–15, 2023), it hit No. 1 on Netflix’s Non‑English Films list with 14.7 million views and 23.1 million hours watched. Numbers aren’t everything, but here they map perfectly to the movie’s word‑of‑mouth momentum.
Within days, it charted in the Top 10 of 62 countries and climbed to No. 3 globally among non‑English films—proof that the film’s cocktail of grief and grit translated across borders. Korean cinema’s global moment isn’t a blip; it’s a heartbeat, and “Ballerina” kept rhythm with it.
Critically, the movie landed on the bright side of the ledger. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a strong approval rating, with many praising the lead performance and the film’s slick visual language, even as some noted the narrative’s minimalism. Think “vibes-forward” in the best way.
Awards bodies noticed the craftsmanship: “Ballerina” earned Blue Dragon Film Awards nominations for Best Music (GRAY) and Best Art Direction (Kim Min‑hye), nods that match what you feel in your bones—the score and production design are doing more than half the talking.
And it’s stuck around. U.S. outlets have continued recommending it in “best Korean movies on Netflix” roundups in 2025, a sign that its replay value and global fandom edits haven’t flagged. If you’ve seen it, you’ve probably shared a clip; if you haven’t, someone’s likely sent you one.
Cast & Fun Facts
When Jeon Jong‑seo steps into Ok‑ju’s boots, she doesn’t just play a character; she calibrates a temperature. Her stillness is the menace; her eyes are the blade. The action is thrilling, but it’s the way she listens—to grief, to guilt, to a promise—that makes every strike feel earned.
Off‑screen, Jeon trained at an action school in Songdo, added muscle, and even tried something new for the film’s soundscape: she recorded a rap verse for the soundtrack. That dedication explains why the fights look “lived‑in” and why the emotions don’t leak—they explode.
As the antagonist Choi Pro, Kim Ji‑hoon plays menace like a melody—smooth at first, then sour. He’s not a cartoon monster; he’s a man who performs charm until it curdles, and Kim lets the mask slip in micro‑expressions that make your skin crawl.
His face‑off with Jeon also doubles as a reunion: the two previously worked together in Money Heist: Korea, and that existing chemistry sharpens their scenes here—familiarity turned into friction. It’s an actorly echo that gives their cat‑and‑mouse an extra crackle.
As Min‑hee, Park Yu‑rim gives the story its softness and its spine. Much of her presence arrives in shards—videos, memories, the warmth of small rituals—and Park imbues each with a light that lingers even when she’s offscreen.
That lingering is the point: Min‑hee isn’t just a victim; she’s the author of the promise that propels the plot. Park’s performance makes the film a duet, not a solo—Ok‑ju’s violence and Min‑hee’s voice moving in step until the last frame.
Writer‑director Lee Chung‑hyun builds this duet with the sensibility that turned heads in “The Call,” and in interviews he’s been open about channeling public outrage into cathartic fiction. You feel his hand most in the contrasts—beauty against brutality, innocence against industry; a “cruel children’s tale,” as he’s described it, that dares to soothe while it sears.
Fun fact for soundtrack lovers: GRAY made his feature scoring debut here, curating an album that moves from synth‑silk to sledgehammer. The OST even features Jeon on the track “Checkmate,” a neat blurring of character and performer that you can hear on the official release.
Another note from behind the camera: principal photography ran from June to late October 2022, with the finished film premiering in Busan on October 5, 2023, before its Netflix launch a day later. That festival bow makes sense—the movie plays big on a big screen, even if its true home was always the platform.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you’ve ever held onto a friend’s last message and wondered how to honor it, “Ballerina” will meet you there. It’s fierce, beautiful, and surprisingly tender—a late‑night watch that lingers into morning. As you stream, remember your own peace of mind matters too; tools like identity theft protection or even the best VPN for streaming can help you feel safer online, and a thoughtful home security system can be a small, real‑world way to protect the people you love. Cue it up on Netflix, let the lights go low, and let this story of devotion move you.
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