The movie’s strategy to build dread is by using the audience’s superior knowledge to point a critical finger at the various cops’ vexing incompetence to properly find the killer’s latest victim. They are not even doing this primarily to save Mi-jin but the captain says himself that his cops should even plant evidence to solve the case in order to draw the media away from an earlier embarrassing situation in which the mayor was doused with human feces under the police’s watch. Joong-ho, working as an outsider, is able to quickly figure more things out that would actually help the cops but his current profession and his former disgrace combined with the fact that he had recklessly beaten the suspect means that hardly anyone will listen. Some of that ignorant judgment from his former fellow cops including his past friend, Gil-woo (In-gi Jeong) teeters into morbid comedy in seeing just how inept they are in overlooking such obviously transparent information and insights.
Many might think that this portrayal of the police force is too cynical but the characters are all so vividly drawn and acted with rough and gruff weathers and the story is told with such conviction that we soon believe it must have the basis of truth (and in fact, the movie is based on a shocking real-life case). The first-time director, Hong-jin Na, along with his co-writers, Shin-ho Lee and Won-Chan Hong, is also uncanny in how he breaks so many conventions of most thrillers and builds a rooting human interest almost outside the initially thoroughly unsympathetic nature of the antihero. We care initially because we have seen that the already sick Mi-jin leaves a 7-year-old daughter (very convincingly acted by Yoo-jeong Kim) home alone to do her work at night. It is when Joong-ho sees that the girl cannot be left alone in this situation that he starts to regain his own conscience and really care about saving Mi-jin’s life.
It is also a testament to Yoon-seok Kim that he manages to maintain a credible gravity of doggedness within his character to help us ultimately identify with his quest (though his “doggedness” is upped with some doses of physical brutality on the various men he questions). Jeong-woo Ha, on the other hand, has a different kind of acting challenge in showing that classic, seemingly contradictory case of almost mild-mannered evil. Many heinous crime stories revolve around deranged people who are never suspected to be cruel by their neighbors because of their quiet, introspective nature and Ha is scary in balancing those two traits.
Article comments
1 - pete webster
thank you for this review. i just finished watching this movie and i was trying to work out exactly what it made me feel and how it did it so convincingly. you pretty much summed it up perfectly. i have to say some of the feelings i experienced during this film were quite overwhelming. i honestly had no idea what i was in for.
thanks again, i look forward to checking out your other reviews.