Astonishingly for a thriller about a prostitute-slashing serial killer, The Chaser has no sex scenes – unless you consider penetrating women’s skulls with a hammer and chisel some sort of intercourse. Director Hong-jin Na seems to, given his inclusion of a psychoanalyst-cum-interrogator whose analysis of the killer Young-min Jee (Jung-woo Ha) would put all post-Freudian film theorists out of work. His diagnosis? In paraphrase: “You’re impotent. So you drive the chisel into women because it’s like having sex with them.”
Phallic symbols aside, the South Korean film makes for a great crime drama by caricaturing the genre’s archetypes. The washed-up, disillusioned cop figure is taken a step further in Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim): not only is he a morally flabby chain smoker, but he’s also a pimp, jealous that some other player has been selling off his disappearing call girls. This player turns out to be Jee, whose history of mutilating children one-ups your everyday blockbuster psychopath who only skinned cats or snapped the necks of birds when he was young. Jee’s awkward school-boy crooked smile quickly gives way to a twisted sneer as the meat hook in his shower (the half-dead, half-naked hooker on his bathroom floor) reveals from the start that he’s treating the girls to a slightly deadlier fate than Eom suspects. When Eom realizes that yet another of his staff – Mi-jin Kim (Yeong-hie Seo), said half-dead call girl – has been sent to Jee, the pimp takes action by tracking him down. As serendipity has it (and it has it a lot in this film), the two men reveal themselves to each other via a freak fender-bender.
Frequent perspective shifts between Eom, Jee and Kim make for intense, fist-shaking dramatic irony, and the decision to reveal Jee’s criminality from the beginning forces the director to include plot twists that compensate for the usual suspense of a whodunit. What’s more, comedy interludes save the film from monotony and give viewers a chance to breathe. Particularly notable is the parallel satire of a peasant who throws faeces in the Mayor of Seoul’s face and the ensuing attempts of the Barney Fife-esque policemen and Colonel Klink-type special forces who attempt to eclipse the messy incident with Jee’s case.
Despite the singularity of the male characters – or perhaps because of it – their female counterparts disappointingly get hardly any exposure. A sense of Eom becoming ever closer to Kim builds through the film, perhaps fuelled by his guilt for sending her to the job, yet Kim herself hardly has any dialogue. The most resolute female is Kim’s androgynous five-year-old daughter, whose latchkey-kid savvy helps her form an investigative duo with Eom.
Regardless of your politics, it’s hard not to get swept up in Na’s innovative use of space. Much of the action – chases, murders and searches – happens on one stretch of residential street yet, like a centimetre-wide square that gets increasingly complex as you keep cutting it in halves, Eom’s search for Kee seems set in a labyrinth of shadows and streetlights, alleyways and locked doors, silence and whimpers. Be prepared to feel morally and spatially disorientated but, as the ancient critic Longinus declared, the truly sublime is not easy on the eyes – it bangs you over the head.

Stephanie Wu