Assassins review – unbelievable murder plot gets a no-nonsense doc

The name of this fascinating, no-nonsense documentary from filmmaker Ryan White is Assassins… though a better title might have been Assassins? Is it possible to be an assassin without knowing you are one? It's a question that haunts this gripping film about the events that led to the bizarre murder of Kim Jong-num, a story of conspiracy and misdirection that would no doubt inspire cries of ludicrousy had it been the stuff of Hollywood invention.

To recap: Kim Jong-num, half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, was assassinated at the Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017 after having a deadly nerve agent smeared on his face. He was dead within the hour. The killers were quickly identified as two young women, the Indonesian Siti Aisyah, and the Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, who – in a twist you couldn't write – explained to the authorities that they'd carried out the murder unintentionally, believing they were acting as part of a prank TV show.

In an age of unnecessarily convoluted and borderline ironic documentaries, Assassins is probably the driest and most straight-forward film that could be made on a subject like this. White takes us through the events leading up to the assassination with the blunt precision of a police briefing: Kim Jong-nam's banishment from his homeland after an ill-judged visit to Disneyland, the humble backstories of the killers, the identities of their handlers, who groomed them as fake participants in countless, harmless pranks before setting them on their final task. Even delivered on the simplest terms, facts laid out free from unnecessary diversions or cutesy needle-drops, it makes for highly absorbing viewing.

After the shocking incident takes place (we're able to witness it in full thanks to the airport CCTV footage), the film moves to the trial; we hear the girls speaking from prison cells via audio recording, wondering if they'll be hanged, and from journalists who covered the story from start to end. To say too much about the exact twists or turns would betray the inherent tension of the piece, though moments of shady government practice and political intervention only serve to muddle the case further. Did these girls have any idea of what they were doing? The film makes no definitive statement, yet it's difficult to argue with the unlikely profiles of these so-called “assassins.”

And what of the unexpected and inspired inventiveness on the part of the North Korean handlers, who managed to devise a form of assassination so in line with our reality TV obsessions? Yet there's also a deeply sad story here about two young women who desperately wanted more from life and who found themselves in a situation they could never have predicted – not to mention a warning about the dangers of fame, which they both found, though not for the reasons they'd hoped.

This is no-frills filmmaking in every sense. But it's also refreshing to be on the other side of a documentary that holds the facts in the highest regard, at a time when the format is so frequently bastardised and elongated across ten-hour episodes in order to drag out a story for as long as possible. It won't win points for style or innovation, but Assassins has something better: an irresistible hook backed up with real journalistic integrity.

Assassins is now available on various digital platforms.