The Chaser ( Hong-ji Na, 2008): South Korea.

Reviewed by Natalie Envall. Viewed at the AFI Film Festival, Archlight Hollywood.

The Chaser is one of a kind thriller and I have never seen anything like it. Sure one might make comparisons to such movies as psycho (1960) counting the fact that the murderer is a guy who mostly keeps to himself and has problems with women in the romantic department, but the structure of the movie is very different than all the other crime thrillers I have seen.

The story starts out with introducing Joong-ho ( Yun-seok Kim ) a former cop turned pimp who’s been having some trouble latley with his girls disapering after seeing a client, a mysterious caller ( Jung-woo Ha ) who he just can’t seem to track down. At first he just thinks that the client is stealing his girls and using them for his own buisness, but the movie taks a turn when he sends one of his girls Mi-jin (Yeong-hie Seo ) who is a singel mother to the client and she also disapears and he later has run in (litterly) with the client and figures out it’s him.

What’s different about this movie is not only do we know who the killer is in the first then minutes , but the characters also know. He confesses right away and still the cops are unable to hold him because there is no evidence, the rest of the movie is pretty much spent following Joong-ho as he searches for Mi-jin in hopes that she is still alive while taking care of her daughter which he is reluctant to at first, but guilt takes over and soon he is sent on a path for vengance.

This movie was very confusing to me, I think it had had great potential, but the story is two hard to follow. I actully had to ask why the murderer was relased because I didn’t understand. That it is hard to understand because it’s a forgien film is a given, but even if it would of been in English it would have been too hard to understand. The dialog said very little and you had to pay really close attention to the details.

Overall the movie was very chilling and had many disurbing scenes and had it had a better structure, better dialog and better introdution to the characters, I think it would have been more frightening and would have affected me more. To understand this movie you have to see it several times.