Tell Me Something (1999)

Detective Cho (Han Suk-kyu), right now under investigation for taking dirty money to pay for the medical bills of his now deceased mother, is still tasked with solving a serial killer case in rainy, dark Seoul. After a couple of dead men, Cho finds out that the victims all have something in common – they once dated artist (and daughter of a very famous artist herself) Chae Soo-yeon (Shin Eun-ha).

While Soo-yeon is not a suspect, she is very much of interest to the investigation, though she doesn’t really appear to want to break out of her shell of being a quiet, mysterious beauty. Perhaps she’ll change her mind when Cho finds himself rather drawn to her; or when the killer’s gaze seems to fall more directly on her than on her former lovers?

Often glacially paced, Yun-hyeon Jang’s serial killer thriller takes all of the elements of the late-90s state of the genre and gives them a good shake in a very typical South Korean approach to genre filmmaking to reconfigure it in shapes still quite recognizable yet also slightly estranged from their common form.

Which, given that part of the film’s thematic heft rests on creating a mood of alienation that’s just as big as its mood of menace, is a rather good way to get its audience on track, or at least in the right mood.

And mood really is where the film’s strengths rest – this is all grungy locations, rain, moody dark lightning, noir gone just about digital, interspersed with some moments of brutality, some of action, and carried by Cho’s halting attempts to move through the labyrinth of a case that appears constructed to foil and fool him personally. Why, if you didn’t know it better, you might think the universe wanted to tell him something about himself, the doubtful nature of mysteries or even the depths of his own heart.

In other – okay, American, hands, this would probably have turned into an erotic thriller with copious fucking between cop and witness, but even though there’s a growing attraction between Cho and Soo-yeon, the film really rather prefers to titillate us through the same sense of distance that attracts Cho, as the men before him, to Soo-yeon. It’s certainly still in the ballpark of femme fatale tropes, but reconfigured for a more distanced world.

Somewhat fitting to its insistence on distance and alienation, watching Tell Me Something is never quite the experience thinking about the film afterwards is – there’s a quality to it that makes it difficult to enjoy it in the moment as you’d do with most other good genre films. Instead, the idea of it, as well as the more abstract elements of its aesthetic start to nestle or linger in one’s mind, turning the experience of watching this much more intense in hindsight than during the actual time spent with it.

Shiri (1999)

Original title: 쉬리

Yu Jong-won (Han Seok-Kyu) and his partner and best friend Park Mu-young (Choi Min-sik when he was rather sleek and well groomed) are working for the South Korean security services, fighting the dastardly plans of Northern spies, mostly successfully. Some years ago, though, a female assassin named Lee Bang-hee managed to paint quite the trail of blood through various officials, ending her series of murders once things got to hot with a goodbye note written on the corpse of spy colleague of Jong-won and Mu-young. Needless to say, this thing still smarts, particularly the more melodramatically inclined Jong-won.

Now, just when Jong-won is planning the wedding date with his fiancée Lee Mying-hyun (Kim Yoon-jin), Bang-hee is becoming active again. Her murders have apparently something to do with the North’s attempts to acquire a basically magical new liquid explosive, though that will turn out to only be the first step in a much bigger and deadlier project.

Formally and stylistically, Kang Je-gyu’s brilliant South Korean action film Shiri is a big sloppy kiss for Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed genre, so it’ll come as no surprise that the film is as much interested in portraying the melodramatically elevated emotional states of its characters through its action as it is in showing fun explosions. For the first forty minutes or so, the film’s attempts in this direction don’t feel to work out quite well enough. The action is certainly kinetic and fast, but its emotional underpinnings don’t quite seem to hit the mark. However, this curious feeling of tepidness isn’t the film failing to hold up to its role models as one might expect, but director Kang Je-gyu playing a longer game, slowly (for the genre, this is still a fast mover in anyone’s book) and expertly revealing greater dramatic and emotional complexity so that it can hit the audience all the better over the head with it. And before a viewer can think “hey, that’s a rather cleverly thought up and well realized way to use these old tropes”, suddenly, personal and emotional stakes have become as big as the action – which is pretty damn big.

Kang doesn’t stop there, though: there’s also the way main protagonist and antagonist are paralleling one another, both also consciously mirroring the separation between the North and South of Korea; and how an at first pretty jingoistic seeming action movie turns into a film that very consciously uses the spectacular shoot-outs and the tears (oh, the tears!) to also talk about the psychological toll the state of affairs between the two Koreas has on the people trying to live their lives there. The film shows a heart-on-its-sleeve sort of pain about the relationship between the Koreas, hiding things South Korean cinema usually tries to avoid even looking at under cover of its awesome spectacle. In other words, unlike a lot of films inspired by the Heroic Bloodshed genre, Shiri doesn’t just take the genre’s cool surface elements (though there’s nothing wrong with that, of course) but actually looks closely at its techniques to then apply them to themes and ideas close to the heart of its director.


This slowly developing depth and complexity is of course only half of the reason why Shiri is quite as wonderful an example of action cinema as it is. There’s also the action itself: it’s kinetic, fast, and varied, but also keeps in mind the importance of some standards of its genre. Glass needs to be broken, cars explode, partners need to die heroically, and happy ends aren’t really in the cards in a world where nobody can survive while being only one person instead of fragmented parts (again mirroring the Koreas).