THE CHASER (Korea, 2008)
Directed by: Na Hong-Jin
Starring: Ha Jung-Woo, Kim Yun-Seok, Seo Young-Hee

In 2007, the Korean film industry hit the skids. Overproduction resulted in a glut of shoddy movies and only 10% of films were turning a profit. Things looked bad, but then two low budget movies released in early 2008 became massive word-of-mouth hits and turned everything around. One of them was THE CHASER. It shouldn’t have been good. Starring two mid-list actors, directed by a first timer who was best known for winning an award for his short film in the Mise en Scene Genre Short Film Festival, and based on the real life serial killer, Young-cheol Yoo (convicted of 20 murders in 2005), it looked like little more than an exercise in pointless gore. But in the hands of director Na Hong-Jin and his two actors, Ha Jung-Woo and Kim Yun-Seok, it turned into a thriller so tense that it felt like it was directed by a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and a pit bull.

Kim Yun-Seok plays Jung-Ho, a disgraced cop turned pimp who spends his nights getting his girls to work harder, cursing them for going missing after running up massive debts and making them go out on late night calls even when they have killer head colds, like Mi-Jin (Seo Young-Hee, Bedevilled). Leaving her daughter behind, she winds up in the house of Ji Young-Min (Ha Jung-Woo) a woman-hating young man with an appetite for torture. When Jung-Ho realizes that the number used to book Mi-Jin is the same as the last number he got booking one of his missing girls, he puts two and two together and realizes that he’s become a conveyor belt feeding victims to a monster. Determined not to let it happen again, he vows to find Mi-Jin even if he has to tear the city apart with his bare hands.

THE CHASER became a huge hit in Korea and the fact that a movie with almost no marketing budget managed to beat Kung Fu Panda and both Iron Man movies, is a testament to the fact that this isn’t an ordinary thriller. THE CHASER is the King of Thrillers, the movie that launched a genre and saved a film industry.