[2][3][4] In Japanese-occupied Korea in 1925, revered hunter Chun Man-duk lives with his teenage son, Seok, in a hut near Mount Jirisan.

The Japanese governor-general overseeing the occupation gathers tiger pelts as a hobby to display cultural dominance over the Korean people, and soon becomes obsessed with killing possibly the last remaining tiger in Korea, an enormous, 400 kg (880 lb) one-eyed male that lives on the mountain; he has killed scores of hunters and evaded capture many times, including Chun Man-duk and his former hunting companions.

It is revealed that years ago, Man-duk mortally wounded the Mountain Lord's mother when she leaped at him as he neared her kill to defend her two nearby cubs.

Man-duk spares the one-eyed cub and its sibling by intervening against the more junior hunter Gu-kyung, who delivered the killing shot on their mother.

After several failures, mounting hunter deaths, and the onset of a harsh winter, soldiers of the Japanese army are dispatched to participate in escalating efforts to find and kill the Mountain Lord, and several attempts are made to enlist Man-duk to facilitate the hunt, all of which he resolutely resists.

[6] Critic James Mudge writes that, despite not meeting box office expectations, "The Tiger: An Old Hunter’s Tale is easily one of the best Korean films of the last year, and a winning marriage of the breathtakingly grand and the quietly philosophical.