There were several sayings that came to mind while watching this Korean shocker. The first was — battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. The other — don't kick hornets' nests. You'll see more than the devil in this bloody and twisted serial killer thriller.
On a snowy night, Joo-yun (Oh San-ha) waits for a tow truck to fix her flat tire. Her secret agent fiancee Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA) tells her to lock the doors and stay where she is then hangs up with her. Big mistake. Along comes Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik, OLD BOY) and asks to help. When the young woman says no, he smashes her window and the rest is not nice either.
Turns out Joo-yun was the daughter of police squad chief Jang (Gook-hwan Jeon, HWAL). He wants revenge. And so does Soo-hyeon. The highly trained agent sets out to make the serial killer suffer and suffer and suffer. He's not going to simply kill the monster, but hurt him over and over again. Along the way the crazed cop leaves other potential suspects bloodied and beaten.
There really isn't a hero here, because Soo-hyeon is just a vicious as the killers. In the process of playing mind games with the murderer of his fiancée, he puts a lot of innocent people's lives in jeopardy. The full ramifications of this he will feel by the film's end.
Director Jee-woon Kim (A TALE OF TWO SISTERS) makes the audience squirm with his violence. We see, no cutting away, a man's Achilles tendon punctured and ripped, a man's head bashed in with a dumbbell and human flesh eaten. The latter is done by another serial killer Tae-joo (Choi Moo-sung), who, along with his creepy girlfriend Se-jung (Kim In-seo), makes a surprise appearance about halfway through. You could classify it as torture porn, especially with the scenes of sexually violence, one of which is on a teen girl.
There are points when the film begins to get gratuitous and then Kim saves himself by either twisting the plot or making the action result in real consequences. He has an uncanny ability to conjure tension out of thin air. You're just watching and something subtle happens and your guts twist in an instant. He does all of this with visual flare. The fight choreography is designed with the characters in mind. Kyung-chul is a brute, but Soo-hyeon is agile and trained. He is the kind of guy who, unarmed, has no problem facing a man with a shotgun. At almost 2 ½ hours long, the film probably could have been tightened a bit though.
The similarities with last year's Korean thriller THE CHASER are great. That film however gave us more to care about and less bloody shock. But by the end, I was also reminded of HOSTEL. What this film does right and that film did wrong is that it never pretends that all this violence is just in a movie. Soo-hyeon's behavior doesn't leave him content on a train at the close. As Soo-hyeon's would-be sister-in-law tells him — revenge is for the movies.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
