‘Assassins’ refashions the stranger-than-fiction killing of Kim Jong Nam into a pulse-pounding documentary thriller
By: Eric Langberg
Tags: Documentary, Movies, Culture, Film, True Crime

This much we know is true: on February 13, 2017, in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia, the brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was assassinated. Kim Jong Nam was killed when two young women smeared a poisonous chemical on his face; he died within an hour of the attack. Shocking images were soon released showing one of the assassins to have been wearing a shirt that said LOL. while she carried out the murder.

That’s about as much as most people remember. As Ryan White, director of the new documentary Assassins, told me, “That was weeks after Trump took office. And so what would have normally been, I think, a top news story for months — one of the biggest political assassinations of our lifetime, and arguably the most spectacular one — quickly dissipated into the ether as a story that there just wasn’t time for, because Donald Trump was dominating the airwaves.”

White aims to correct the record with his new film, in virtual cinemas today and coming to Video On Demand next month. Or, more accurately: he aims to tell the full story for the first time, in a way that hasn’t yet penetrated the popular consciousness. Because the actual story of what happened to Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong — the women accused of killing the brother of one of the most barbaric world leaders in modern history — is wilder than most anyone knows.

Doan Thi Huong, whose ‘LOL’ shirt shocked the world.

As outlined in the film, the killers claimed total innocence. Furthermore, they claimed total ignorance of what they had done. They did not mean to kill Kim Jong Nam, they claimed; rather, they were under the impression that they were filming a prank show for the Internet, a silly video where they surprised a random man by putting lotion on his face. In their telling of events, they didn’t know who their victim was. They didn’t know the cream they had been given was poisonous, they said; rather, they thought they were just trying to make people laugh.

Assassins is a documentary, but it plays like a pulse-pounding, globe-trotting political thriller. It’s spectacularly edited, repeatedly circling back around to the killing itself from new angles, peeling back the crime’s many layers and versions of truth. Much of the runtime is devoted to reconstructing Siti and Doan’s years leading up to the assassination, following their journeys to Malaysia from Indonesia and Vietnam respectively, outlining how they got caught up in what certainly seems like it might have been a years-long North Korean plot of grooming them for the assassination.

White shot the film as the case unfurled, so there is an immediacy to the film, too; this is not a true-crime documentary that merely reconstructs a case after-the-fact. When the accused killers finally go to trial, the specter of the death penalty hanging over their heads, the suspense is nearly unbearable. Because, as far-fetched as the “prank show” excuse seems at first… it just might be true.

Mugshots of Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, the accused murderers behind the killing of Kim Jong Nam.

In creating the documentary, White worked with the killers’ lawyers and had access to the full trove of evidence meant to provide their defense: their text messages, their social media history, and detailed interviews with the women themselves. There are new interviews with the accused killers, as well as with their families; Assassins includes recreations of the assassination as well as multiple security camera angles of the actual crime not widely available before this film. It’s a stunning assemblage of footage, representing an incredible level of access to the case, and it makes for a heart-pounding experience to watch.

A lot of our current “prestige” true-crime genre moment is about stories where the justice system has failed. From Making a Murderer to The Jinx, from Serial to, yes, The Keepers, viewers can’t get enough of stories that interrogate our relationship to what “justice” means and what we do with the fact that it so often does not seem to get it right. In telling a story of the intricacies of the Malaysian justice system, a justice system different to our own — one with a mandatory death penalty, one without juries — Assassins toes an interesting line. To Western eyes, this trial may seem like it is guaranteed to result in injustice, but Assassins never passes judgment.

As Ryan White told me, “Justice was never going to be achieved. From the moment Kim Jong Nam was assassinated: the North Korean operatives got away with it. The North Korean regime got away with it. They literally leave the country as he’s dying.” This means that the questions of “justice” considered in the film become thornier; can we really blame the Malaysian government for trying to make sure someone is convicted of the crime? Is that really so different than our own justice system’s prioritization of convictions over truth?

There are no easy answers to be found in Assassins. This is a story where the truth means many things, depending on who you choose to believe. Assassins certainly has a point of view, and presents a certain case. For one reason or another, the evidence gathered by the defense is not able to be presented in the courtroom; instead, we come away with the idea that, while “justice” may not have been possible in the courts, documentary filmmaking may be its own form of justice. The true-crime genre has a lot of problems, but done right — as Assassins is— films like this can get important stories and perspectives out into the world in a way no other medium can.

Check out my interview with filmmaker Ryan White here; it contains mild spoilers for the outcome of the trial, which are clearly marked. He told me about the craziest 72 hours of his filmmaking career as he juggled filming this, Visible, and Ask Dr. Ruth; we also talked about what “justice” means in this film and in his documentary career writ large. Don’t call him an activist; he just likes holding powerful people to account.