“New Trial”—A bruised teen, a broke lawyer, and a country’s long walk toward justice
Introduction
The first time I watched New Trial, I didn’t just see a movie—I felt a knot in my stomach tighten with every frame. Have you ever shouted at a screen because the truth felt so close and yet so unreachable? That’s the current running through this film: a quiet, relentless ache that asks what we lose, personally and as a society, when the justice system mistakes speed for certainty. I found myself thinking about mothers who wait outside prison gates, about teenagers who sign papers they can’t fully read, about lawyers who start out chasing a headline and end up chasing their conscience. And somewhere amid the fluorescent buzz of interrogation rooms and the weary creak of courthouse doors, the film whispers a question that’s hard to un-hear: what is a life worth after the state gets it wrong?
Overview
Title: New Trial (재심)
Year: 2017
Genre: Crime, Drama, Courtroom Drama
Main Cast: Jung Woo, Kang Ha-neul, Kim Hae-sook, Lee Dong-hwi, Lee Geung-young
Runtime: 119 minutes
Streaming Platform: Not currently on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Viki, or Kocowa in the U.S. (checked March 9, 2026).
Director: Kim Tae-yoon
Overall Story
On a humid night in August 2000 at an intersection in Iksan, a teenage delivery boy named Hyun-woo stumbles upon a taxi splashed in blood and a driver fatally wounded. He’s not a suspect—he’s a scared kid who calls it in—and yet that distinction blurs the moment he’s pulled into the police station. The officers want answers more than evidence, and the questions become accusations, then threats. As hours turn into days without a parent or lawyer present, Hyun-woo’s fear calcifies into a signed confession that reads like someone else’s nightmare. When the court accepts that confession, the boy’s future closes like a cell door. He will spend a decade wearing a crime that is not his, and the town will move on, comforted by the appearance of resolution.
Years pass. When Hyun-woo steps out of prison at last, he isn’t free so much as emptied out, the calendar pages still clinging to his shoulders. Back home, his mother Soon-im has kept the faith with the fierceness of someone who refuses to let grief calcify into bitterness. Their apartment is small but crowded with hope: boxes of letters, clippings, and the belief that if someone would just listen carefully, the truth would sound different. Yet the city is loud with indifference, and Hyun-woo avoids crowds the way a tender bruise avoids touch. Shame and anger coil inside him, and the questions he asks himself are harsher than anything a judge could pronounce. In a quiet way, the film shows how surviving prison and surviving after prison are two different sentences.
Enter Joon-young, a lawyer with debts on his back and pride in his pocket. He’s the kind of attorney you might side-eye at first—a hustler on the margins who’s learned to treat “legal representation” like a gig economy hustle. He meets Hyun-woo not because destiny tapped him on the shoulder, but because a case like this smells like a headline and a ladder up. But have you ever taken a job for the wrong reason and found the right reason along the way? As he flips through the file, the dates and times refuse to sit still, and the bruises in the old photos say more than the typed pages. Somewhere between opportunism and obligation, something steadier begins to take root.
The first hurdle is procedural: how do you pry open a judgment sealed years ago? The film lays out the groundwork with clarity—petitions, motions, affidavits—and the feeling that the system is designed less to correct itself than to defend its previous self. Joon-young tracks down the original investigators, and what he finds is a chain of custody for the confession that looks more like a chain around a boy’s neck. The officers speak in tidy phrases, but their silences are where the truth lives. The lawyer’s job shifts from persuading a court to persuading the country that a confession under duress is not justice but its mask. If you’ve ever watched a criminal defense attorney push against the weight of “case closed,” you’ll recognize the way persistence becomes a kind of faith.
As the investigation pushes forward, the film widens its lens to the early-2000s culture of interrogation rooms where taped statements mattered more than timelines. We see how status and hierarchy can shrink a teenager into a narrative convenience. The community’s need for safety—understandable, human—was answered with a quick arrest and a neater story. Joon-young’s team reconstructs the route that night, re-creating the minutes between a delivery run and a dying taxi driver’s final radio call. They test how long it would take to ride a scooter from one point to another, and the geometry of the city begins to argue back. Slowly, the line from “witness” to “murderer” snaps under the pull of simple physics.
Meanwhile, Hyun-woo and his mother relearn how to share a table without the glass wall of a prison visiting room between them. The film is patient here, letting grief breathe; have you ever tried to say “I’m okay” when the words stick to your ribs? Soon-im folds dumplings with hands that shake, and Hyun-woo offers to help the way sons do when they’re trying to be men. Their conversations, sometimes only a few words long, carry the weight of years stolen. It’s in these domestic scenes that New Trial plants its flag: justice isn’t an abstract noun—it’s dinner, rent, and the chance to be ordinary again. Kim Hae-sook makes motherhood look like a full-contact sport, where love is both shield and soft target.
Opposition arrives not just from the original detectives but from legal heavyweights who’d rather protect the system’s face than its soul. Attorney Goo Pil-ho embodies this resistance with a professional cool that suggests “best practices” even when the practices went very wrong. He frames the retrial bid as chaos, a slippery slope that would flood the courts with “do-overs.” The state’s position is simple and devastating: certainty is stability; doubt is danger. Watching Joon-young argue against that current feels like watching a lone swimmer cut across a cold, wide river. The courtroom sequences crackle not with Perry Mason flourishes but with the quieter tension of documents, precedents, and who gets believed when memories conflict.
As press attention grows, the film shows the double-edged glare of publicity. On one side, exposure fuels momentum; on the other, Hyun-woo becomes a symbol before he’s fully a person again. Strangers recognize him on buses and talk about him as if he were a plot twist they bought a ticket for. Joon-young, for his part, starts turning down the microphones he used to chase, shifting his energy to corroborating statements and digging into leads others dismissed as “inconvenient.” The term wrongful conviction stops being a headline and becomes a lived-in reality: missed birthdays, employer side-eyes, and the quiet panic that flares when a siren passes. It’s here the film folds in themes Americans will recognize—from debates over coerced confessions to the work of a civil rights attorney when police misconduct is alleged.
A possible alternate suspect emerges, not as a mustache-twirling villain but as a messy human whose timeline keeps overlapping the crime’s timeline a little too neatly. A retired officer with a long memory mentions a cluster of unsolved attacks in the area around that era; patterns begin to surface once you stop insisting there was only one story to tell. The reinvestigation becomes a map of blind spots—who was inconvenienced by the truth, who benefitted from the fast answer. When Joon-young presents these threads to the court, the air in the room changes; even the judge seems to lean forward a fraction. The film doesn’t cheat with gotchas; it lets evidence and empathy do the heavy lifting.
By the time the motion for retrial lands on the docket, the stakes feel less like win/lose and more like heal/keep bleeding. Hyun-woo, who has spent the film trying to make his voice a fact again, stands straighter. Soon-im shows up to court in her best clothes, as if to tell the state with her presence: “You took ten years, but not my belief.” Joon-young’s closing words avoid grandstanding, focusing instead on why the record must be right if the law is to mean anything beyond paperwork. The crowd outside is restless, the cameras are ready, and the country that once turned the page too quickly opens the book again. It’s not a neat bow; it’s a necessary breath.
The film ends close to the hinge of history, because in real life, the hinge swung wide. The case that inspired New Trial—often called the Iksan or Yakchon Intersection murder case—saw the wrongfully convicted man acquitted in November 2016, and the true perpetrator later convicted and sentenced in 2018. New Trial doesn’t claim that triumph inside its runtime, but it earns the feeling that justice is possible when process serves truth instead of appearances. That gap between the film’s final frame and the real case’s conclusion makes the experience linger: you walk away aware that changing a verdict is one thing, repairing a life is another. And you hold a little tighter to the idea that courts exist not to guard past mistakes but to correct them.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The Night at Yakchon Intersection: The film’s opening sequence drops us into Hyun-woo’s routine—a delivery run, a shortcut, a red light—and then into chaos as he finds the bleeding taxi driver. The camera hugs his perspective, so we feel the nausea, the shock, and the split-second decision to call for help. It’s a masterclass in setting stakes without exposition: a boy who did the right thing is about to pay for the wrong thing. The early radio chatter from other taxi drivers adds a communal panic that makes the city feel complicit. When police sirens slice through the night, we hope rescue has arrived; instead, the machinery of suspicion begins to turn.
The Interrogation Marathon: In a fluorescent-lit room with no clock, questions become traps. The officers shift from “help us” to “say it,” and the bright light on Hyun-woo’s face becomes an accusation by itself. The scene avoids gore and still hurts to watch: a pen is placed just so, a form slides across the table, and a teenager nods because he’s too tired to keep resisting. You can feel the law bending under the weight of expedience. Later, when the typed confession is read aloud in court, the page feels colder than any weapon. This is where the film’s critique lands hardest: a system that privileges paperwork over people is just organized harm.
Mother and Son Through the Glass: The visitation room sequence is quiet devastation. Soon-im sits straighter than her years, painting hope onto every sentence so her son won’t see her break. Hyun-woo smiles the small, practiced smile of someone trying to be less of a burden than he feels. Behind the glass, their fingertips don’t quite meet; the film doesn’t need violins to make your throat close. When she promises to keep fighting, you understand that a retrial petition can be powered by a mother’s heartbeat as much as by legal citations. It’s love as due process.
The Lawyer’s Breaking Point: After a day spent begging creditors for mercy, Joon-young finds himself face-to-face with the case file he planned to use as a lifeline. The pages don’t just look wrong; they feel wrong, as if a life were misfiled under “resolved.” There’s a moment at a ramen stall when he admits, more to himself than anyone, that chasing fame won’t help him sleep at night. This is the hinge on which his arc turns from opportunist to advocate. You almost see the word “representation” change meaning in his mouth—from a business to a duty. The steam from the broth fogs his glasses; clarity arrives anyway.
Reenactment on Two Wheels: Joon-young reconstructs Hyun-woo’s scooter route the night of the murder, stopwatch in hand. The city’s corners and crosswalks become witnesses more reliable than the taped confession. When the timing doesn’t line up—when even reckless speed can’t place Hyun-woo at the scene when the prosecution insists he was there—relief and fury arrive together. It’s the kind of sequence that makes you want to map your own route home, just to feel how the world argues with lazy narratives. In a few minutes of wind and asphalt, the film lets evidence, not emotion, overturn what we thought we knew.
The Motion Heard Round the Court: During the hearing to consider a retrial, the room is a powder keg of decorum. The state leans on precedent; Joon-young leans on anomalies that are starting to look like a pattern. Hyun-woo keeps his eyes forward while Soon-im threads her fingers together as if prayer could keep them steady. When the judge agrees that the old verdict is credibly in doubt, the gallery doesn’t erupt—it exhales. The film doesn’t pretend that a retrial equals redemption, but in that breath, you feel years of silence finally unclench. It’s the sound of a country choosing accuracy over inertia.
Memorable Lines
“I signed because I thought they’d let me go home.” – Jo Hyun-woo, naming the trap One sentence captures the psychology of coerced confessions: exhaustion, fear, and the fantasy of escape. The line reframes him not as “a liar recanting,” but as a kid bargaining for daylight. It also indicts a culture that equates paperwork with truth. In the courtroom that follows, every piece of evidence is measured against this human moment.
“If the record is wrong, the law is wrong.” – Lee Joon-young, drawing a hard line This is where a struggling attorney becomes an advocate. He stops arguing like a man with debts and starts speaking like a man with convictions. The line resonates beyond the case, a reminder that legal systems only earn respect when they correct themselves. It’s the closest the film comes to a mission statement for any criminal defense attorney who chooses principle over convenience.
“An apology won’t give my son his years back.” – Soon-im, refusing consolation prizes The mother’s clarity slices through institutional politesse. In a story full of filings and motions, she keeps the cost visible: birthdays missed, trust eroded, health frayed. Her voice grounds the film in lived consequences that no verdict can fully fix. It also hints at the civil remedies families seek when police misconduct steals time they can never recover.
“Let’s do this again—this time with evidence.” – Lee Joon-young, resetting the rules There’s wry humor in the delivery, but the stakes are deadly serious. He challenges the court to privilege timelines, forensics, and corroboration over tidy narratives. The line invites us to imagine a system where “legal representation” means building a case, not bulldozing a person. It’s also the moment he stops chasing the camera and starts chasing the truth.
“You can’t fix a broken night by breaking a boy.” – A retired officer, finally telling the truth When a former cop admits the interrogations went past the line, the film complicates simple hero/villain boxes. He acknowledges the fear that drove the original investigation, but refuses to excuse its methods. The confession lands like a small earthquake in the courtroom record. It’s the kind of sentence a civil rights attorney waits years to hear on the stand because it opens the door to accountability.
Why It's Special
Have you ever felt that a single moment decided your whole life for you? New Trial is the kind of film that sits with that feeling and refuses to look away. Based on a notorious real case, this 2017 Korean drama pairs a bruised lawyer with a young man whose adolescence was stolen by a coerced confession. If you’re in the United States, you can stream New Trial on Prime Video right now; it’s also available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and it streams on Netflix in South Korea, with availability varying by region.
From its opening minutes, New Trial makes the everyday feel dangerous: the hum of a taxi meter, the gleam of a fluorescent-lit interrogation room, the weight of a mother’s silence. The plot never forgets that behind every headline is a home, a kitchen table, a history. The film’s foundation is the 2000 Iksan taxi driver murder case, where a teenager was wrongfully accused and later sought a retrial—real-world stakes that intensify every scene.
Director Kim Tae-yoon tells a legal story without turning it into mere procedure. He favors faces over flourishes—letting us watch pride, panic, and hope flicker in close-up—so the case becomes a human journey instead of a puzzle to be solved. That instinct comes from a filmmaker who has wrestled with social justice on screen before; his previous movie, Another Family, took on corporate accountability, and here he doubles down on how institutions can fail ordinary people.
What’s striking is how the writing resists easy catharsis. New Trial doesn’t chase a showy “You can’t handle the truth!” finale; instead, it honors the slow, unglamorous grind of getting a life back. As KoreanFilm.org noted, the screenplay was completed before the real retrial concluded—so the drama leans into moral consequence rather than courtroom spectacle. That choice gives the story a lived-in honesty.
The acting sells every bruise and breakthrough. The lawyer’s weary hustle isn’t just comic relief—it’s survival. The wronged young man isn’t framed as a saint—he’s angry, scared, and raw, which makes his moments of grace land even harder. Add a mother whose love is equal parts fierce and exhausted, and you have a trio that feels truer than a transcript. If you’ve ever watched a loved one push through a system that wasn’t built for them, you’ll recognize these faces.
Tonally, the film is a rare blend of legal drama, investigative thriller, and family melodrama. The camera’s cool, observational style—paired with the crisp cutting of editors Kim Sang-bum and Kim Jae-bum and the steely lensing of cinematographer Kim Il-yeon—keeps the tension taut while leaving space for tenderness. It’s a reminder that justice stories don’t have to shout to be thunderous.
What lingers longest is the way New Trial reframes justice as care: a lawyer who starts out chasing a fee learns what it means to show up; a son learns what a decade can’t take from a mother; a community learns how fragile “truth” becomes when power leans on it. The film also resonates beyond the screen: years after the events depicted, the real case saw the actual perpetrator convicted—a coda that deepens the movie’s ache and its hope, and that will make you think differently about how we value access to legal services and the life-altering work of a committed criminal defense attorney or wrongful conviction lawyer. Have you ever needed someone to believe you before the facts could?
Popularity & Reception
When New Trial opened in South Korea on February 15, 2017, word of mouth spread fast. That first full weekend, it took the top spot with 755,268 admissions, a standout debut for a grounded, mid-budget legal drama that asked viewers to lean in rather than lean back. Audiences weren’t just buying tickets; they were buying into a conversation about how justice happens.
Industry trackers highlighted the film’s momentum: in its early frame it captured roughly a third of the nationwide box office, a sign that the story of a coerced confession had cut through blockbuster noise. Reviewers noted how the movie’s urgency drew from reality, not from car chases—and that made viewers feel complicit in the system it depicted.
By month’s end, New Trial had stacked up over two million admissions domestically—remarkable for what many considered an arthouse-leaning title. In a February snapshot of the Korean market, it was singled out as a major success relative to its scale, proof that audiences were hungry for empathetic, truth-based cinema.
Internationally, the film found its second wind through streaming and imports. As it arrived on platforms and festival programs abroad, viewers praised its restraint and emotional wallop; you can still feel that steady hum of discovery as new fans add it to watchlists and recommend it to friends who love true-case dramas. Today’s accessibility on Prime Video in the U.S. keeps the conversation alive, letting more people encounter its quiet power.
On the critical side, commentators have highlighted its human-centered approach. KoreanFilm.org emphasized the film’s focus on inner transformation over grandstanding, while cast directories and aggregator pages continue to anchor discussion around the leads’ credibility and the director’s choice to let performances breathe. It’s the rare “issue film” that earns tears without asking for them.
Cast & Fun Facts
Jung Woo anchors New Trial as attorney Lee Joon-young, a man whose swagger is more survival mechanism than superpower. Jung shades the role with hard-won empathy: when he sizes up a case file, you can see both the debt collector and the idealist arguing behind his eyes. His scenes with the client’s mother—half negotiation, half confession—are where the film’s heartbeat gets loud without ever getting sentimental.
Off-screen, Jung Woo is beloved for bringing rough-edged warmth to underdogs, a quality that helped make him a breakout in Reply 1994—and it’s easy to see that lineage in New Trial. He channels that same “everyman you’d trust with a spare key” energy into a lawyer who doesn’t start as a hero but quietly becomes one.
Kang Ha-neul plays Jo Hyun-woo, the young man whose life stalls at a police station and restarts—painfully—years later. Kang’s performance is all tight shoulders and swallowed words; trauma has taught Hyun-woo that being small is safer, and watching him grow back into himself is the film’s most delicate arc. In one unforgettable beat, a simple apology lands like a verdict, and Kang lets silence do the talking.
Kang’s range has since carried him from action-comedy to romance, even netting him a Best Actor trophy for TV down the line. But in New Trial you can already see the discipline that defines his work: controlled, specific, and open to vulnerability. It’s the kind of turn that makes you want to recommend the movie to a friend who swears they “don’t do courtroom dramas.”
Kim Hae-sook is Soon-im, the mother who wears resilience like a threadbare coat. She doesn’t make speeches; she packs lunches, waits in lines, and keeps receipts—quiet acts that add up to defiance. Kim gives us a parent who knows that paperwork can be a battlefield, and her calm presence makes every small victory feel colossal.
Often called Korea’s “Nation’s Mother,” Kim Hae-sook has spent decades embodying caretakers with nuance, and New Trial lets her do it without cliché. She brings the weight of lived experience to every scene, reminding us that the costs of injustice are counted in grocery bills and bus fares long after the news cycle moves on.
Lee Dong-hwi brings vital texture as Mo Chang-hwan, channeling the nervy energy of a striver who has learned to read rooms and dodge trouble. Whether providing grit or a glint of gallows humor, he widens the movie’s tonal palette, giving the central duo a world to push against.
Viewers who know Lee from Reply 1988 will appreciate how he pivots here: less neighborhood clown, more streetwise operator. It’s a reminder of his versatility—and another reason New Trial rewards rewatching, because the supporting performances carry their own miniature thrillers inside the main plot.
Behind it all is writer-director Kim Tae-yoon, who threads empathy through every department choice. Coming off Another Family—a film that also confronted institutional power—Kim approaches New Trial with a documentarian’s patience and a dramatist’s heart. He knows that the smallest gesture can be a revolution when the odds are stacked, and he trusts the audience to feel that truth without rhetorical fireworks.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you’ve ever wondered whether one steadfast believer can change a life, New Trial answers softly but firmly: yes. Queue it on your preferred streaming service tonight, and let its steady compassion work on you while it also sparks real-world questions about access to legal services and the life-saving work of a seasoned criminal defense attorney or wrongful conviction lawyer. And when the credits roll, ask yourself—whose story would you fight to reopen? Sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is listen.
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