The film starts a bit harsh with a girl dead in a ditch. The local police inspectors, Seo and Jo, are angry. The crime scene has not been preserved. A farmer drives his tractor over a foot track just before their nose. But we’ll realize soon that the inspectors are actually not much better than the police agents. Jo thinks more about fighting and drinking in the village’s bar than about solving murders. Seo keeps him calm as much as he can.
But then comes the help of an inspector from Seoul named Park. Seo takes it as a personal offense. He helps the guy as he is supposed to. But he always tries to show how bad Park is, that he was not right, that he searched in the wrong place, that he does not know the region enough to solve the mystery, etc.
Seo and Jo are rather funny in the start when we discover their personality. But Park will show us that they are actually rather pathetic.
The actors are convincing. They unveil their characters progressively just as in real life, making this a human and realistic thriller. At first, we don’t know much about them, especially not their bad side. And then we find out this and that about them. We realize that they make more mistakes than we thought. We realize that the good guy was maybe not the one we thought at all. Seo and Jo are slipping in an infernal wheel: the more they make mistakes, the more they need to cheat, the more they make mistakes, etc.
Also, the more Park progresses on the investigation, the more the two others try to deny him. They are ready to quite many cheatings not to loose their face. Seo was a good man as long as he was considered one of the honorable men in the village. But he starts to change. He does not retain Jo any more as the latter beats up suspects, most of them not even witnesses. Under torture, many of them end up acknowledging the murders just to be proved innocent by the metropolitan police officer shortly after.

Around this dark story the director and actors created a film that is breath taking, beautiful and even funny. The contrast between these styles is rendered at different levels : scenario, pictures, dialogues.
The film holds a lot of mistery. There are many questions and many answers. But you might get answers you did not expect while you might miss the ones you waited for. So this is the kind of movie that lets you think during and after the final credits.
Still the comedy is quite present, as for the start at least. The director managed to insert a lot of funny episodes. The most representative to me is the scene that you can see in the trailer. A man asks his way to a woman, both walking on a country road. The woman is a bit scared and avoids the man. Another guy stops his car by them, comes running out of the car and jumps on the man his two feet first. It goes very fast, the effect is brilliant and very amusing. The humor is always welcome and never disturbs the dramatic thread that is behind, which is not all common for a film that is neither a comedy nor a parody. It is a thriller indeed.

As the film advances, the humor lets place to the psychological horror though.
The whole story is about the neglecting that can become a very serious mistake and turn into responsibility for death or crime. The two inspectors did not manage to solve the mystery quickly. As they trample, girl are being assassinated.
Rather than admitting their failure, they deny obvious facts and make up fake ones. Their lies are supposed to avoid others to discover their mistakes. Slowing down that process also slows down the investigations. And girls still keep on being assassinated.
Then they find the perfect culprit. A retarded boy describes precisely one of the murders. The two inspectors are pretty happy having found him. They just lack material evidence. So said, so done. They just make up a few ones. But what they did not take in account is the way the retarded boy described the crime. Being retarded he always talks impersonally. It turns out he wasn’t the killer but an innocent witness, a little bit late though.
The neglecting pushed the police officers into lies and treachery and into violence. Their unfaithfulness has to be paid by innocents being tortured, a retarded boy being abused emotionally and socially, and by girls being murdered.

The film is inspired from real facts, which makes it even tougher to bear for the spectator. But you might not sense the horror as much during the film than after having seen it.
Three levels of horror are depicted. The first one, the violence of the killer, is wanted and gratuitous. We won’t see much of that in pictures. The second one, stupid and gratuitous, and wanted, is the violence of the persecuting inspector against innocent people. We’ll see some pictures of that one, mostly the result of it and the cries. And the most marking one is the psychological violence of the abuse of a retarded boy and of innocent girls whose lives could have been spared. That one was not directly wanted by the responsible persons, but is rather a consequence of viscous circle that started out with neglecting, pride and simple lies.

This film is pretty much clipped in the Korean reality and countryside life, but it also has a special identity of its own thanks to this ingenious mix of styles. It is a very good film, arrived almost by surprise, as we don’t see so many either on our side of the world. And it won several prizes in festivals indeed.

Country : South Korea. Year : 2003. Directed by Joon-Ho Bong. With : Kang-ho Song, Kim Sang-kyung, Hee-Bong Byun.