Haemoo, (Sung-Bo Shin, 2014): South Korea

Reviewed by Thiago Coelho. Views at the Lobero Theater, Santa Barbara.

Directed by Sung-Boo Shin, Haemoo, which means “ocean fog” in Korean was based on the true story of 25 Korean-Chinese illegal immigrants who suffocated to death in the storage tank of the fishing vessel and their bodies were dumped by the ship’s crew into the sea on October 7, 2001. 

A fishing trawler returns to port with a meager catch and when its captain is offered a pile of money to help some Chinese-Korean illegal immigrants sneak onto the peninsula he is quick to pocket the cash. He heads back out to sea along with his five-man crew and in the dead of night they make contact with another vessel carrying their payday. Soon the youngest crew member forms an attachment with one of the smuggled girls, but as tensions between the crew and their passengers mount and when the Korean maritime police suddenly appear, things quickly spin out of control.

The film uses ocean as background a sea that always looks dark and slimy, giving a feeling of darkness in the movie, transmitting to the audience a feeling so real that is possible even to imagine a fishy odor. Haemoo is not a movie just a murder and killing of people, but it also shows how good people turn into a cold blood person when they are in the edge. It is a very complex movie disregarding to its entertaining parts.

In this movie there is not space for comedy, always very dark and showing the worst part of the people, giving a heavy feeling for those who are watching it, and with a lot of scenes of explicit sex, discomforting the audience who is watching it.

The screenwriter on this movie was Bong Joon Ho, who is known for making complex movies, and in this film it was not different. It makes the audience to think how people can follow their basics instinct when they are afraid of something. So many things happen in the same time in this movie that makes hard for the audience focus in only one thing, and in the end of movie is not a really end, it keeps open for the audience imagination, so they can decided and argue what really happened.