Seoul survivors (The Chaser)

No one does dark, morally ambiguous thrillers like the Koreans - at least at the moment. From Sympathy for Mr Vengeance to Bittersweet Life, from Memories of Murder to The President's Last Bang, the cruel and unusual gems keep on coming... and that's only the internationally distributed tip of the iceberg.

I finally caught up with Hong-Jin Na's The Chaser (Chugyeogja), a massive runaway hit at the Korean box-office which has crossed over to the West thanks to a stellar festival run. It's had a UK release and has been snapped up by distributors across Europe and Asia, but it looks like Australians will have to wait for the imminent American remake to see this story on the big screen (or a local fest with its finger on the pulse). Word is that a script is being sought from William Monahan - who remade Infernal Affairs into The Departed - and that Leonardo DiCaprio will play one of the two leads.

Joong-ho is a washed-out fourtysomething ex-detective turned ringleader in a nearly-bankrupt call-girl operation. Though two of his girls have gone missing, he sends a third, Mi-Jin, to a client known for his sociopath ways, even though the woman is ill and has no one to loo after her seven year-old daughter. Things get ugly really quickly for Mi-Jin once she enters the client's house. She soon realizes she is next in line in a killing spree which has taken the lives of 9 other girls.

The well groomed though clearly psychotic serial killer bears a hint of resemblance to Kevin Spacey's character in Se7en, while the cat-and-mouse chase is constructed with the elegance of Silence of the Lambs. As with these two landmark thrillers, it's the screenplay's firm grasp on the codes of the genre which draw us in, but it's its unpredictable structure which keeps us hooked.

In The Chaser, viewers' expectations are constantly confounded. By the end of the first nerve-jangling act for example, the killer our "chaser" thought he'd never catch is already in police custody. The narrative engine changes from the search for a perpetrator to the search for evidence, and eventually to the search for Mi-Jin, who's alive but trapped in the killer's lair. Later still, in a vicious, I-never-thought-it-would-happen moment, the film shifts gears yet again, taking a turn into an even darker night where redemption comes only at a steep price.

Yun-Seok Kim's affecting performance as Joong-ho is the spine of this many headed-beast of a film. We're firmly in noir territory and Joong-ho is comfortably more "anti" than "hero". He gets our sympathy despite his violent, misogynistic behaviour, only because we sense in the screenwriters' layered characterization the embryonic rhythms of a drawn out moral awakening.

In a society corrupted by greed, ignorance and moral decay, Joong-ho's complete lack of faith in human nature is a given - that he is able to feel anything resembling guilt or compassion feels almost heroic.

From a tonal perspective, the director's heroism lies in his ability to juggle horror with humour without giving an inch. As with Memories of Murder and The President's Last Bang, much of the film's coal-black humour stems from the grotesque incompetence of the police and the authorities. This seems to be a recurring theme in a national cinema which has only been truly free to speak its mind for about 20 years.

Hong-jin Na displays a confidence which betrays his short CV as a director. He plays brilliantly with pacing, atmosphere and audience expectations even when such high-wire acts risk bringing such a long, convoluted film down. He is helped in this by the tangible talent of editor Sung-min Kim (Memories of Murder, The Host) and particularly evocative cinematography and score.

In its refusal to bow down to formula, its concern with process rather than result and ultimately, its use of the thriller format to paint rich portraits of conflicted, obsessive men, the film The Chaser reminds me of the most is Fincher's accomplished Zodiac. Both films successfully deconstruct real-life events through genre fiction (here the real-life case of Young-cheol Yoo, whose 21-victim spree in 2003-4 launched a nation-wide debate about the death penalty) as a means to expose an entire nation's troubled political, social and cultural psyche.

Seoul survivors (The Chaser)