The Chaser (2008)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Humanity’s greatest talent in the face of adversity is our ability to understand and adapt. If we can see motive, and we can see rationale, if we can visualize how a horrible thing happens, we can prepare for it. This is why people who can never stand to watch horror movies can sit through endless hours of CSI.
Movies and television shows like CSI give us the meaning and motive behind the chaos, they show us the predictability in horrific events like rape, murder, rampages and accidents.
For all its gruesome visuals, CSI is ultimately sooth-saying. It’s bringing order to chaos.
The slick Korean thriller The Chaser does the exact opposite. And it is the best crime thriller to come out of any country since David Fincher’s Seven.
Here we have a criminal investigation film that flips every single convention of the genre. The Chaser begins with a serial killer being caught, and then transforms into a race against time to find the evidence needed to charge the killer with the crime. The Chaser is not about discovering ‘whodunit’, the audience knows who the villain is, knows what he’s done, there are no red herrings, there are no false leads. The Chaser is about the system falling over itself to find the evidence to make the accusation stick; and it’s also about one man’s desperate search for the killer’s latest victim.
In shows like CSI, you get more technobabble than Star Trek, because it’s trying to show you the effectiveness of the system, how the order we built in science can beat the chaos. The Chaser creates mountains of tension by doing the opposite. The Chaser shows us how the very system we create to fight monsters, is sometimes as impotent and powerless in the face of those monsters as any of their victims.
I’ll be blunt. The Chaser is the ‘next’ Oldboy and the best and most original Asian thriller in years. The fact that director Hong-jin Na is a first-time filmmaker is astonishing because The Chaser is crafted like a veteran director was behind the lens. The Chaser is like a Korean Hitchcock film in its dedication to its suffocating atmosphere and to creating a sense of mounting tension and threat. Everything about The Chaser is precise and consistent. First time directors, hell directors who have shot five or six films, often drift from the main themes of the story to pay homage to their various influences, giving nods of the head to their favorite filmmakers. The Chaser is consistent both behind the camera and in front, no shots or edits are superfluous, everything from the score to the lighting to the performances are spot on and consistent. The Chaser maintains its mood with a sense of single-minded tenacity; it has virtually no drift, every aspect of the film is directed one hundred percent to furthering and flushing out the plot and to deepening the level of characterization.
This is a legitimate visionary work with an overwhelming sense of interest in the minutia and the tiny details. Every single thing in the movie from the tools that the killer uses, to the clothes the characters wear, to the living spaces of each character is used to tell you something about them and to help you get you inside their heads and understand their motivations. Every place, every set, every single bit of the movie has character to it. Everything feels like it has been lived in.
No thriller is really complete without good actors and The Chaser delivers a wide range of powerful, multi-dimensional performances featuring Kim Yoon-seok as a former police officer guilt stricken over placing an innocent single mother in danger. Yoon-seok’s character dedicates himself to finding her and to putting away the man who may or may not have murdered her. At first we are suppose to see Yoon-seok’s character as the justified vigilante doing things by his own code. He’s the guy that typically in these kinds of films the audience turns to for salvation when the system fails, the rebel who will work outside of the system to get the job done when the system falls apart. In The Chaser we see that things aren’t that cut and dry; Kim Yoon-seok’s character in his efforts to save lives and imprison the killer, sabotages the police and the investigation and inadvertently helps the killer.
Speaking of the killer, Je Yeong-min plays a frighteningly arrogant and disturbing psychopath, with a visceral honesty not seen since Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Most of the time in films serial killers are like supervillains, they cackle and do lengthy monologues and appear intellectual or bad-ass, outsmarting or simply walking through the police. In The Chaser, the killer is hideously arrogant to the point that it makes you want to beat his face in with your bare fists. He’s the kind of unrepentant evil that doesn’t come from a superior intelligence or wit or physical strength, but from a grotesque delusion of arrogance and supremacy. This killer doesn’t hide or deny his accomplishments; he is so very proud of what he’s done, he wants people to know what he has accomplished, and the first opportunity he is given to admit his crimes, he does so to the police with a gleeful, child-like innocence. The serial killer has a sick ‘What, me worry?’ attitude that makes him infinitely more believable and at the same time more horrifying.
It goes without saying that The Chaser has already been picked up by Hollywood to be put on the fast track to be remade with American actors and by American filmmakers. Heaven forbid that anyone ask the average film-goer to read subtitles or accept anything other than a white man as their hero. What is notable however, is that The Chaser is being done by the team that remade Infernal Affairs into the Oscar-winning Departed.
That alone speaks volumes about the quality of the film and why you should definitely see this brand new classic thriller.
The Chaser is what great horror is all about. Check it out.
Watch the trailer:
Popularity: 3% [?]
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