The plot is simple. A pimp hunts down a serial killer who has been murdering his girls. What first-time director Hong-jin Na creates out of this premise is an edge of your seat thriller that is always one step ahead of our expectations. It made be think about how painfully conventional most thrillers really are.
Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim, RUNNING WILD) is a former cop who has went into the more lucrative pimp game. However, he's still drowning in debt and his girls are disappearing on him, believing a client is kidnapping them and selling them as sex slaves. He gets a call from a client and sends out Mi-jin Kim (Yeong-hie Seo, BEDEVILLED), who is sick and must leave her young daughter Eun-ji (Yoo-jeong Kim) at home alone. Joong-ho starts looking into this client and discovers he was the last person to call for the missing girls. He starts to fear that he has sent out Mi-jin to meet the serial killer Young-min Jee (Jung-woo Ha, TIME).
It's hard to discuss anymore of the plot without revealing too many of its surprises. Lets just say that how Joong-ho Eom and Young-min Jee cross paths is unexpected. They're chasing each other throughout the film, but who the cat is and who is the mouse flips. Mi-jin Kim fate is kept in a tense balance, but not in an annoying "lets keep too much information from the audience" kind of way.
One of the most impressive elements of the film is how quickly and efficiently it makes us care about these characters. Joong-ho has changing motives. First he needs to find his girls for profit motives. Then he is driven by guilt for sending a sick mother out into harm. Then he confronts the reasons why he left the police department. We instantly identify with the beautiful Mi-jin. She just a girl being called into a job she hates when she's feeling terrible, but she needs this job for her daughter.
They are pitted against villains we instantly hate. Young-min is a sicko. He's a sloppy killer who is getting more arrogant with each kill that he gets away with. He's not some devious mastermind, but a deranged young man, which makes him all the more dangerous, because you never know what he's going to do. He's based on Yoo Young-chul, Korea's worst serial killer, who lured escorts into his apartment where he beat them with a hammer and then decapitated them for being sluts. Another adversary is the police. The film is merciless on the ineptitude, bureaucracy and corruption of the Seoul PD. Joong-ho might have cops that help him out, but ultimately they get in the way of his goals more than aid him.
Na, along with his co-writers Won-Chan Hong and Shinho Lee, knows how to balance what we know with what the characters know. While he perfectly manipulates the viewer, we never feel like we're being manipulated. While one would define this film as a genre film, it is a film not bound by any one genre. Conventions be damned. Some events are shocking and hard to deal with, but when you think about it the placement of the events is the bold part. An American film would have put it right up front and slavishly went along to a preordained ending. This film emotionally engages us and truly creates the feelings of the characters and not only tacking them on as plot points on a familiar frame.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
