Assassins

Assassins

The CCTV video from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13, 2017 shows two adolescent girls coming up the escalator separately, walking past the shops, seemingly carefree. One has long hair. The other has a short bob and wears a white t-shirt with “LOL” emblazoned across the front. They each approach a squat, middle-aged man from behind; the footage is so pixelated it’s hard to tell what’s happening.

Then they both walk away from him in separate directions with their hands in the air; they visit restrooms before leaving the airport in separate taxis that take them back into the city. The man turned out to be Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s “dear leader.” The girls’ hands were slathered with VX nerve agent a lethal chemical so fast-acting it can be absorbed through the skin and kill before antidotes even set in: In the footage he is already slightly limping as airport security accompanies him when the VX takes effect; Kim Jong-nam would be dead within 20 minutes.

Two days later, Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam and Siti Aisyah of Indonesia were arrested. They said they thought they’d been participating in a YouTube prank show; that it was body lotion on their hands; that they didn’t know who Kim Jong-nam was (one of them didn’t even recognize his name). And so an international press frenzy began asking: Were these women trained assassins or innocent pawns of North Korean agents?

This should have been amid all those cameras and recorders and notepads at subsequent news conferences the question not only for defense attorneys but for everyone watching. The details are almost too absurd to follow along: It feels like a meme come to life: Spreading deadly nerve agent in some poor dude’s eyes just for shits and giggles.

LOL! Could they really have been that naive? Could they really have had no idea what they were doing? Could this overt, broad-daylight attack really have been part of a long con organized by North Korea to eliminate the potential “rival” for Kim Jong-un’s “throne”? Or were these two apolitical girls without known North Korean connections actually cold-blooded killers?

There is too much news in the world to absorb it all, and so we turn to documentaries and podcasts or at least I do when we want someone else to explain things for us. And that’s what Ryan White does with his documentary “Assassins,” and he does it plainly, which is a good thing given the outrageousness of some of what occurred: You’d think that impulse to play up the outrageousness would be irresistible; you’d think it would be fun to riff on the more unbelievable aspects, via visual flourishes or pointedly ironic needle drops (the laugh lines practically write themselves).

But White resists. In his mostly excellent documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth,” White spiced up the narrative with animated sequences and an actress-voiced voiceover; these did little to illuminate the subject and felt unnecessary. Here, though, he does not take that bait: He plays it straight, carefully untangling the different webs of meaning and implication political, social or otherwise so as not to further alienate us from Siti’s or Doan’s worlds but rather draw us closer into them: How were they tricked? How were they used? What was this deadly game that North Korea put these girls up to in order to settle its own deeply disturbing family feud?

Both Siti and Doan were born to poor families in the countryside, and they came to the city as country girls who didn’t know any better. Doan had dreams of being an artist; an actress, specifically. Prank videos were a popular trend at the time she moved to Jakarta this was after Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass trilogy but long before YouTube’s growth spurt so she got involved with those. It didn’t pay much, but it wasn’t hard work either, which was always a bonus for her.

Siti’s history is a little more grim: She left her village for a clothing factory job in Jakarta, married her boss there, had a baby at 17 and lost her in the divorce when she fled to Kuala Lumpur and started doing sex work. So when one of the many men who appear throughout “Assassins” tells Siti about a potential gig working for Japanese people making prank videos where she’ll get paid (and quite possibly famous) for them, it doesn’t take much selling. It sure beat fucking strangers for 50 ringgit a pop.

The person who manages the two girls is another figure known only as Mr. Y (it’s unclear if that’s his real name or just what he goes by), who makes sure all three of them rehearse the pranks and go over everything that needs to happen in them ahead of time together; then he coaches them on what kind of effects they need to be having when whatever it is they’re faking happens. “Everyone has their own roles to play,” he texts Doan later on which should be chilling even if you assume he’s just some weird Japanese video-producer, but becomes especially so if you think of him not as some weird Japanese video-producer but rather as a secret agent from North Korea.

White knows we need guides for all this stuff, and he picks two good ones. Two journalists, to be exact. The first is Hadi Azmi, a Malaysian journalist who covered this story from start to finish for Malaysiakini and the rest of the world up through the beginning of 2019 when both girls were on trial (no spoiler to say they were later released). He does a great job explaining some things about Malaysia’s state-owned media that I didn’t know before reading “Assassins” like how there aren’t any rules against printing lies; they just can’t print anything bad about the government and talks about how those limits came into play in looking for the truth here.

Because it was also possible for both girls to have been put to death anyway, if whatever court they went through had wanted them to be: This isn’t like America or something, where you have protections if someone tries to charge you with a crime that would result in your execution but has no evidence against you (though technically neither girl had much of an alibi either). “Malaysia,” Azmi says with a wry grin, “is one of those weird countries who actually has diplomatic relations with North Korea.”

The second guide is Anna Fifield, who at the time she talked to White was still working as The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Beijing but has been covering North Korea since 2004. She’s very good at putting people and places into context; Fifield was invaluable for understanding Kim Jong-un’s motivations during these events because she’s already done a lot of work piecing together his family history over the years.

With her help we’re able to see why he might’ve taken such an interest in getting rid of his half-brother: Not only was Kim Jong-nam more likely than anyone else alive at that point outside of Dear Leader himself (Kim Jong-il) to be next in line for Supreme Leader after their dad eventually died, but their father doted on him a lot more than he did any of his other children too, which had always been a sore spot with Kim Jong-un.

The question of “guilt” is cut-and-dried: You can see the attack on the footage. They did it. But are they guilty under these circumstances? “In many ways, this is the perfect crime,” Fifield says. And North Korea almost got away with it; would’ve gotten away with it if not for Azmi and everybody else who smelled a rat from Day One if not for people like them, and people like the girls’ legal teams, whom White eventually brings into the story (we’re also witness to their struggles to build their cases).

Going through thousands of text messages from phones they’d taken as evidence that didn’t contain one word about North Korea in any of them damning evidence for the prosecution presenting that material to an unfriendly court; all the private conferences and public ones where lawyers try to figure out how much they can say without getting themselves disbarred or worse while still telling enough of what happened to get somebody’s attention who might be able to help Doan and Siti somehow.

In “Assassins,” as in life, there are many tantalizing roads not taken. White keeps it about the girls; he plays audio of them being interviewed from prison, where they sound dazed and disoriented. This is not the thing’s primary concern, but the geopolitical implications are clear. Kim Jong-un has nothing to fear for the foreseeable future now that his brother’s out of the way. After Kim Jong-nam’s assassination, a bombshell drops: He had been a high level CIA asset and was holding a suitcase full of American cash. It’s even more sickening than everything else we’ve seen when President Trump says upon hearing this news that he believes North Korea over America’s intelligence community.

Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong are free. But Kim Jong-un still won this one. The victory here is only partial.

Watch Assassins For Free On Gomovies.