H (2002, directed by Jong-Hyuk Lee) appeared right at the crest of the K-horror boom of the early aughts, so it found its way into relatively wide distribution around the world when it maybe ought to have remained a local obscurity. I mean, it's fine, I guess, but at a time when Korean films generally were carving out a reputation for impeccable film craft, it seems curiously deficient as a film narrative. It's clunky when it had the wherewithal to take advantage of a burgeoning pool of talent. Its leading actress, for example, was in the K-horror masterpiece, A Tale of Two Sisters, in the same year. That's a comparison it cannot withstand, but there are a few other touchstones before which it also shrinks in magnitude.
The story is a serial killer procedural. A woman's body has been found in a landfill. As they are gathering forensic evidence, the police also find the corpse of a recently born baby nearby. Its umbilical has been chewed through rather than cut. Soon after, another pregnant woman is murdered on a bus. The murderer strangled the woman, and cut open her uterus. When she's found, the foot of her baby protrudes from her belly and wiggles with life. It doesn't make it into the world before the police arrive. These murders are echoes of a series of murders a year earlier. Those murders ended when the killer brought his last victim to the police himself and gave himself up. Detectives Kang and Kim are on the case. Kang is a hothead, governed by his emotions. Detective Kim prefers to keep the case at arms length. She is cold and cerebral in her approach to her job. Additionally, her fiancee was driven to madness and suicide by the previous case, so she insulates herself behind hard boundaries. Their first order of business is to interview Shin Hyun, the perpetrator of the previous murders. He has an airtight alibi for the current killings: he's on death row. Detective Kang demands to know who the current killer is. He knows in his gut that Shin is behind everything. But it's not Shin who leads them to the murderer. Kang and his sidekick, Detective Park, track the current murderer to his apartment where a chase ensues, leading Kang and the killer to a gay nightclub where the killer cuts the ear off a woman on the dance floor and plunges his scalpel into her throat. Kang shoots him. The pattern of the copycat holds. The third victim of the previous spree was also a lesbian. Unfortunately, the murders continue even though Kang put the actual murderer in the hospital. Their gaze next falls on Shin's psychiatrist, Dr. Chu, but she winds up dead. Then their eyes fall on her boyfriend, Choi, and HE winds up dead. Eventually, the detectives begin looking at themselves...
You don't have to squint very hard at this movie to see the plagiarism at work here. The trope of interviewing a serial killer in his cell for insights into a current murder comes from Thomas Harris and Red Dragon, and are filtered through films like Seven, Tell Me Something, and Cure. Cure in particular seems to be this film's primary source. It's a spoiler, I guess, but an alert audience will clue into the fact that the title of the film refers to hypnosis before the halfway point of the story. "Hypnosis" is in fact the title of the film when it reveals it on the first card of its end credits. And the clues play fair when it gets to its WTF ending. This is not a movie that confuses the audience with cinematic legerdemain. It's a flat procedural. It leans into that in order to soften the blow of some of is more grotesque images. It front-loads these images into the first act, perhaps in the realization that presenting the audience with a shot of a dead baby on the slab awaiting autopsy provides the filmmakers any way to go further without completely alienating an audience.
Yum Jung-ah is fine as Detective Kim, though the part doesn't ask her to stretch her abilities. She is cold and collected throughout and doesn't strike any obviously false notes. Ji Jin-hee is less composed as Detective Kang. He has leading man good looks, but he's a bit of a doofus. He's the emotional half of the team, which is a nice bit of gender inversion even if it's cribbed from Mulder and Scully. Ji doesn't perform emotionality well, though. He seems borderline hysterical in his scenes with the murderer, and to be honest, the murderer just isn't that intimidating. Detective Kang's twitchiness is a tell, too, and Shin picks up on that immediately. Shin himself, we are told, is 22 years old, and he still has the callowness of youth. The actor who plays him, Cho Seung-woo, was 22 at the time and looked younger. He looked like a refugee from a K-pop band. He doesn't feel like a murderer let alone a mastermind ala Dr. Mabuse, either because of the actor or (more likely) because of the soliloquies he's given to perform. I suppose it's credible that he's an incel who has a surface familiarity with Nietzche, but if he's the monster gazing from the abyss, the monster hunter should have no fears. Hannibal Lecter he is not. There is no philosophy there, only incomprehensible nonsense. I dunno, maybe that's the point.
Given the nature of its killer, it's worth mentioning that this is a deeply conservative horror movie. It is staunchly anti-abortion and anti-single motherhood, which perversely punishes such things by murdering single mothers and virgins who might become single mothers. The politics of its images are a muddle, which is probably the single thing that undermines the film's effectiveness. And the theme of the contagious nature of violence is right there in front of the filmmakers. They're too blind to see it. H pales in comparison to the other fireworks displays other Korean directors were setting off in the year of our lord two thousand and two. Those films were not beholden to the conservatism that lingered after the end of the dictatorship in South Korea. They were, instead, a bit like the radical films that came out of Spain after Franco left power. This film's main sin is cowardice, but the filmmaking isn't very good, either.
Welcome once again to the October Horror Movie Challenge. This year's challenge is once again linked to my friend Dr. AC's annual Scare-a-thon. This year's beneficiary is International Rescue Committee, which helps mitigate humanitarian crises all over the world. The crisis in Gaza is currently foremost in their efforts. Donations at the link.
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