A while ago Korean friend gave me a dvd that probably sat dusting on my nightstand for almost a month. Besides his remarks that the movie was "good" and that it was selected for Cannes festival I remained pretty ignorant until I decided to watch it last night. The film's theme might perhaps fool you into thinking that it's cliche story about serial killer preying on prostitutes and self-conflicted cop hunting him down. We are led to believe that we know that kind of drama all too well from both real life, Jack the Ripper, and from fantasy world,"Seven". The presentation of the classical theme is built around suspense and race against time; the chaser who is trying to find the serial killer's residence, where last victim Mi Joon might still be alive, before Young-Min (the killer) is released from police station. The style that the director engages builds Hitchcockian suspense that if you have ever experienced it, leaves you numb in limbs and in cold sweat.
However, I want to discuss here the incredible parallel theme that the director adopted to show about inefficiency of bureaucracy and indidividual's helplessness and inability to challenge the system. At the beginning of the film when the chaser is about to deliver his own justice against the murderer, he's caught in the most comic and absurd scene interecepted by a street cop. The scene is played in the middle of traffic girdlock that the two have caused; both stand as if the two system anomalies were cutting the normal flow of the system's traffic. Of course such obstacle has to be dealt with and removed asap and here, the two are dragged into police station where Young-Min confessess in most ridiculous and non-dramatic way of murders that he committed. The confession is received as complete farce among the staff of police station and the murderer remains out of focus. Instead the attention ridiculously remains on the chaser who is accused of beating Young-Min. The chaser in turn tries to fight the authority and convince them of his innocence while the real murderer is ignored.
Perhaps this scene is reminiscent of
Purloined Letter and Lacan's seminar on this famous Poe' piece. The murderer is precisely able to escape persecution because he laid out cards open on the table where everybody is stubbornly digging somewhere. Might be a good theme to look into...
I found one of the final scenes reminiscent of Kafka's Castle where K struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of the castle. Kafka did not was not able to finish the Castle but the scene in the movie where the chaser is trying to enter the domain of murder and where he's held against with more than 2 pair of hands amazingly parallels with the atmosphere of surreality and invisble forces present in Kafka.
