The pithily titled Korean thriller H (2002) begins with the decapitated body of a schoolgirl being discovered in an unnamed city’s landfill. What looks like a young life wasted and dumped takes a turn towards the gruesome when an unborn foetus is also accidentally found amidst the mounds of waste. Four days later, on February 14, it is bloody Valentine for an unmarried mother, when she is brutally slain inside a city bus before it arrives at the terminus. Here, too, when a still twitching arm of a foetus is found half ripped out of the womb, detectives Kim Mi Yun (Yeom Jeong-ah, who acted in the following year’s horror hit A Tale of Two Sisters) and her partner Kang Tae Hyun (debutant Ji Jin-hee) notice an eerie similarity in the modus operandi of the now-confirmed serial killer with that of another convicted mass murderer, Shin Hyun (Cho Seung-woo).
The only problem is that ten months ago Shin Hyun had voluntarily walked into a police station, carrying with him in a bag the body of his latest victim. On confessing to six horrific murders of women, he is now on death row, counting down the last few days of his life. Evidently, there is a copycat killer on the loose. To obtain information that might help solve the case and stop further murders from occurring, detectives Kim and Kang decide to pay Shin Hyun a visit.
While what puts the two detectives on Shin Hyun’s trail are the obvious similarities between the recent spate of murders to those committed by him, ironically, it is resemblance of a different kind that puts us—the viewers—off, the moment the scheming, calculating, Nietzsche-quoting killer-on-death-row enters the scene. The setting, the sequence, and the situation all hark back to Jonathan Demme’s multiple Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Granted, the ode is not as blatant as the Christian Alvart (Pandorum, Case 39) directed German film Antibodies (2005), where another serial killer named Gabriel Engel (played by André Hennicke) had proudly proclaimed ‘What did you expect? Hannibal Lecter?’, but the likeness to that classic thriller is all too obvious to be ignored.
As discerning film-watchers, we all know that it is impossible to steer clear of all clichés, no matter which genre a filmmaker is trying to explore. That is the reason we were willing to forego the hackneyed characterisation of an expressionless detective, who has still not come to terms with a personal tragedy; her greenhorn brash, over-enthusiastic, impatient partner, who is diametrically opposite to her in character traits; the portly policeman, whose sole existence in the film is centred around providing some ill-advised comic relief; and the incessant chimney-like smoking by the two protagonists that reveal that the screenplay writers were in a haze while penning the detective duo, rather than express any depth of character.
These missteps aside, if there is one image that summarises this stillborn effort at crafting an effective thriller, it is that of the unborn foetus. It is nothing but an allegory of how Korean filmmaking was being prevented from evolving beyond an embryonic stage by Hollywood, before directors like Chan-wook Park, Joon-ho Bong, and Jee-woon Kim resuscitated it to life. In this context, it might be pointed out that the first of Park’s riveting revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)—the second film of the trilogy being Oldboy (2003) that single-handedly put South Korea firmly back on the firmament of filmdom—was released almost exactly nine months before H.
Coming back to H, the intentions of the filmmaker, akin to those of Shin Hyun, were noble, at least to themselves. One need not be a semiotician to read the anti-abortion subtext running throughout the film. But both first-time writer-director Jong-hyuk Lee and the character of Shin Hyun committed a similar error. Both got embroiled in the word ‘copycat’.
The initial interest aroused to try and figure out how a behind-the-bars serial killer is pulling the strings gets diluted by the red herrings thrown at us. The number of suspects is just too many, which, in most cases keeps us involved, but in this particular instance causes confusion. Moreover, it seems, the director, in his fervent enthusiasm to depict the tussle between the heart—(as portrayed by Detective Kang, who seems to take every atrocity around him—from a torn umbilical cord to a traffic jam—to heart)—and the mind (the ice-cold exterior of Detective Kim, who smiles exactly three times during the entire film) has thrown the entire volume of Psychology 101 at us. So, we have a doctor specialising in neuro-psychiatry, who has this curious habit of flashing a mysterious smile whenever she is in the company of cops; a patient, who suffers from a recurring horrible nightmare, which, supposedly, lies at the root of his psychotic behaviour; an abstract painter, who appears like the proverbial dues ex machine, and is proclaimed to be suffering from a multiple personality disorder; and last but not least, the prevalent belief among Koreans that a foetus becomes aware even when inside the womb, and the information gathered therein remains latent throughout one’s life as suppressed, unconscious memories.
After 106 minutes of mishmash that involves prostitutes and psychology; honour and horror; nicotine and Nietzsche, one is almost tempted to project Shin Hyun’s paraphrasing the German philosopher’s popular quote: ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ on to the film and brand it as ‘abysmal’.
And as far as the elaboration of ‘H’ provided at the conclusion of the film is concerned, no matter what the director has depicted, it will take a lot to dissuade us from believing that it did not stand for ‘Homage’—an homage to Hollywood, and not a highly-recommended one at that!
No comments:
Post a Comment