The Chaser (2008)
Directed by Na Hong-jin
Joong-ho is a dirty detective turned pimp, who's in financial trouble as several of his girls have recently disappeared without clearing their debts. While trying to track them down, he finds a clue that the vanished girls were all called up by the same client, whom one of his girls is meeting with right now.
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What critics compared The Chaser to
Recalling Bong Joon-ho�s Memories of Murder in its tonal shifts, its ultimately downbeat outlook, and its subject matter, The Chaser is doubly impressive for being a first feature.
Whereas Bong Joon-ho 's Memories of Murder used a criminal investigation in dictatorial South Korea to suggest endemic figurative impotence, Na Hong-jin's spiritual successor makes such flaccidness literal vis-à-vis its sexually frustrated, prostitute-slaughtering serial killer (Ha Jung-woo).
He has made other terrific movies in a more familiar action-adventure vein, including “The Chaser” and “The Yellow Sea.”
A weird Japanese stranger seems to bring rampant evil to a remote and still superstitious South Korean village in this huge local success for director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea).
With two features under his belt – 2008's The Chaser (an unexpectedly affecting serial-killer thriller inspired by true events), and 2010's The Yellow Sea (an ultraviolent exercise in desolation) – Na has one of the most assured sensibilities to come along in genre film during the last 10 years.
The Wailing is written and directed by Na Hong-jin, who became a household named to cinephiles with the harrowing thriller The Chaser, and the haunting story of desperation, The Yellow Sea.
It took six months for writer-director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser) to shoot the movie, and the apparently painstaking approach of Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (a collaborator of Bong Joon-ho’s) has resulted in a story that truly feels saturated with a sense of spiritual foreboding.
Na’s The Chaser and The Yellow Sea are riveting thrillers, but what the director accomplishes here is quite different.
In a 1930's Korea under Japanese colonial rule, con man Count Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha, "The Chaser") hires Korean pickpocket Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) to get a job at the secluded estate of the fragile Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee, "Right Now, Wrong Then").
Newcomer Kim Tae-ri stars as Sook-hee, a young Korean pickpocket who is chosen by her gang leader, Count Fujiwara ( Ha Jung-woo of Never Forget and The Chaser), to help him execute an elaborate long-term con to seduce, marry, and rob orphaned young heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee, No Tears for the Dead).