DVD ADDICT
THE CHASER (Chugyeogja, Korea, 2008, colour) directed by Hong-jin Na and starring Joong-ho Eom, Jung-woo Ha, and Yeong-hie Seo. Anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer, 123 min. In Korean with optional English and Korean subtitles. Optional DTS soundtrack. Second DVD includes unsubtitled interviews, documentaries and other extras. (Region 3, NTSC)
PLALAI FAIFA
Korean directors have a knack for making crime melodramas so intense and violent that they leave you feeling blasted. This new film, superbly paced and directed, is a brilliant showpiece of the style, and it is all the more remarkable because it is director Hong-jin Na's debut feature.
You may wince to learn that it is yet another serial killer movie - the Genre that Wouldn't Die. But maybe there is an advantage to coming to The Chaser expecting another standard procedural with the police working against time as the corpses pile up, because this one has its own ideas. Cliches of the genre are set up and then suddenly reversed, and there are plot turns so dreadful that few directors aiming at the mass audience would risk them. There is, as so often with our Asian movies these days, an American remake in the works. It will be interesting to see how the US director deals with one especially vicious shock toward the end, if he manages to get it past his producer at all.
Director Hong-jin Na jacks the tension up high right away, during the opening title sequence: a pretty young prostitute leaves her car with a client and seemingly never returns, as her pimp discovers the vehicle parked in the same spot and covered with fallen leaves weeks later. The pimp, Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim) has been plagued by disappearances among his girls, and soon discovers that all of them have vanished after meeting a client with the same telephone number.
He is convinced that the man is a competitor who has sold the girls off to someone else, and begins investigating. After paying some visits he finds that other call girl services have been losing women to a client with the same number. If he can track the customer down, he thinks, he will be able to find the missing girls.
When a new call comes from the suspicious number, Joong-ho orders one of his remaining girls, Mi-jin Kim (Yeong-hie Seo), to leave her sickbed and little daughter to meet him, and then to direct Joong-ho to his home on the sly using her mobile phone. Once inside the house Mi-jin realises the customer, a young man named Young-min (Jung-woo Ha), means to harm her, but when she tries to phone Joong-ho, there is no signal. Seconds later Young-min is upon her, trying to murder her by hammering a chisel into her head.
Joong-ho loses track of her and assumes that she, too, has been kidnapped and sold, but while driving around trying to find a lead, by sheerest chance his car collides with one driven by the killer, whose odd behaviour triggers his suspicions. As a result, a half-hour or so into the film, murderer Young-min is in police custody, confessing freely and in great detail to a dozen killings. His account is so horrific, however, that Joong-ho thinks he is crazy, and continues to believe that Mi-jin hasn't been murdered, but sold.
The kicker in this sharply plotted film is that the killer's capture and confession, the big event in most movies of this kind, is just part of the setup. Director Hong-jin Na shows us early on that Mi-jin, although injured, has survived the attack, and that her fate depends on the exasperatingly inept actions of a pimp and police force who know nothing of her situation, and who have other things on their minds.
For much of the film, the thing that disturbs Joong-ho the most is the money he has lost through the girl's disappearance, and the ridiculous police are more concerned with an incident in which a protester has hit the mayor square in the face with a bag of faeces ("History will be my judge!", he shouts.) than with the possibility that a mass murderer is sitting right in front of them. There is a time limit, too. In Korea, a suspect can only be held for 12 hours without a warrant, and no one is willing to issue one to hold a young man who seems to be crazy.
Situations familiar from other movies keep coming on track and then derailing. At one point Joong-ho teams up with Mi-jin's little girl, maybe five years old, who is very bright and catches on to things too quickly. When Joong-ho takes some of her mother's hair from the apartment, she asks him point-blank if it is for a DNA test, and sidesteps all his attempts to throw her off base. There are opportunities on all sides here for the movie to take the audience-pleasing route of maudlin, cute-kid chat, but Hong-jin steers it off in a less comfortable direction.
Sometimes the surprise ironies and U-turns he works into the plot clatter a little, especially when given some thought after the film has finished. One crucial episode in a grocery store toward the end of the film feels especially contrived, but few viewers will be immune to its stunning effect.
Performances, as almost always in good Korean films, are superb. Yun-seok Kim brings the kind of all-out his portrayal of Joong-ho that we have seen so often from Min-sik Choi and others that we almost take this level of artistry for granted when watching Korean movies. Jung-woo Ha's Young-min is just as riveting. He is blase, almost robot-like when he commits his crimes, but watch the way his seemingly feigned abstraction starts to slip away in a scene where he is left alone in the police station with a woman policeman, and again, more violently, when a psychiatrist begins probing. He is a creepy close relative of the hypnotist Mamiya in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure.
The Chaser is quite a violent film, although far less so than Korean hits like A Bittersweet Life. Squeamish viewers might do well to stay clear, but others may find Hong-jin Na's first feature to be one of the most imaginative thrillers to have come along in some time.
I bought my copy online at yesasia.com.
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