A Taxi Driver: The Road to Enlightenment

The last four years have delivered a hard lesson: It takes an incredible amount of evidence to open up people's eyes to institutionalized brutality. Because what it takes isn't a single heinous act (like separating babies from their mothers then putting them in separate cages) or endless deadly examples (like cops shooting innocent black people in their homes and on the street). Many naysayers dismissively view such atrocities with relative disinterest. They make excuses. They remain untouched. "If only they'd...," they say with a shrug about the victims. No. What it takes to awaken these bystanders is for the truth to get personal. The coronavirus becomes real when a close one dies; widespread violence becomes problematic only when it happens in the front yard. What it takes is being thrown in the middle of the mess. What it takes is direct impact.

That's what happens to Kim Man-seob (Song Kang-ho), the Seoul cab driver who hustles his way into being the wheels for German reporter Jürgen Hinzpeter (Thomas Kretschmann); the latter's itching to get the inside scoop on the military takeover in South Korea. A former soldier who can't believe the worst about the military or the government, Kim gets a radical awakening when he's caught in the middle of a riot where peaceful civilian are killed for protesting the coup. But even that doesn't guarantee his conversion. The belief that one can save oneself, the habit of trusting the system, the inclination to distrust the evidence before one's own eyes... is that strong. Based on a true story, Jang Hun's A Taxi Driver is a beautiful illustration of how painful accepting the truth can be.