Well, it appears I’m not having much luck with Korea… After the rather uneven and not-quite-satisfying Samaritan Girl, which showed promise, I’m now running up against H, a serial killer murder-mystery-thriller that, while skillfully-made, frustratingly shoots itself in the foot by aping conventions on a globe-wide scale.

On a rainy night in a South Korean junkyard, a worker makes a gruesome discovery: the mutilated body of a woman lying amongst the garbage. Called in to investigate is a trio of detectives: Mi Yun (Yum Jung-ah); Kang (Ji Jin-hee), who is new to the force; and Park (Sung Ji-ru), a pudgy guy who serves as comic relief. While investigating the crime scene, Park, yelling to Kang, slips, and in doing so unearths a second body: a fetus. When, a few days later, the body of another girl is found, similarly mutilated, Mi Yun becomes worried: these murders precisely resemble the first two murders in a string of six that were committed several months earlier.

Perhaps not unwisely, the two cops (you can pretty much forget about Park now, he’s not that important) decide a talk with the first killer is in order; as such, Kang is sent to interview him and promptly proves himself the worst police interrogator in history by sitting patiently while the murderer, Shin-Hyun (Min Woong-ki), rants, blathers, questions, and generally does his best Hannibal Lecter impression for five minutes or so.

As the duo proceeds with its investigation, the only real clues that it has to go off of are the patterns set by the original murders, all of which targeted women who might be considered immoral (e.g. unwed mothers, lesbians, abortionists). After a series of clues leads them to a suspect, Kang manages to catch someone in the act of committing the “third” murder and so takes him into custody; however, the killings soon continue. Baffled by this, the police continue the investigation and keep uncovering different suspects. Can so many Korean men really desire to replicate an older series of murders, or is there really a far more simple, sinister and stupid explanation to this mystery?

Well, if you’ve got any sense, you’ll know the answer to that previous question is “yes,” since if it weren’t, I wouldn’t have bothered asking it. And this is where H’s fatal flaw lies. Up until the final 15 minutes, I was willing not to hold its blatant ripping-off of Se7en and Silence of the Lambs against it; after all, it was as slickly-made as those films and kind of close to being as entertaining. Then they went and fucked it up (for lack of a better term) by throwing in the most arbitrary, illogical and downright depressing “twist-ending” that I have seen quite some time.

It doesn’t help, either, that I saw it coming… Here’s what happened: after receiving my little tan-yellow package from Mr. Lawrence Raffel, I promptly dug into it and started investigating my DVDs. Not unreasonably for someone who bought a DVD, I took a look at the disk’s insert and happened to glance at the chapters listing; and the title for “chapter 15” (the climax) made it quite clear to me where this film was headed. While I partly blame this on Tartan, I nevertheless also blame it on the film: after all, Tartan’s title, while not quite ambiguous enough, nevertheless left it possible that a variety of things could have happened; unfortunately, H doesn’t show much creativity here either, and simply apes the solution to numerous other Asian serial-killer-thrillers of recent years (which include one that was reviewed just days ago on this very site, which perpetuates the feeling of unoriginality). What’s frustrating about this ending, though, is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the internal logic of the movie: this plot element crops up completely randomly, and the only reason it might come as a shock is because it comes totally out of left field. The fact that the film then takes this development to its most needlessly, grimly nihilistic extremes only adds insult to injury; there’s no forgiveness, hope, or even motive in the end, folks, so you’d better be in a pretty damn good mood before you watch this.

Anyway, while the ending is a massive, major, catastrophic, horrifying (I really can’t stress this enough) mistake, there are nevertheless some other minor flaws that detract from the movie as a whole and keep it—even before its ending—from reaching the Silence of the Lambs-level of greatness to which it aspires. First off is the fact that our protagonists are never really fleshed out very much. Mi Yun, for example, spends most of the movie like a walking robot, never daring to show the slightest bit of emotion, which leaves her with a character that somehow manages to be completely devoid of characteristics. Kang is better, and Ji Jin-Hee does a good job of making him a protagonist you can sympathize with (which makes the ending all the more irritating); however, he has a disturbing lack of back-story and seems to be one of those movie cops who is perpetually on the job without ever taking time to do things like eat or sleep.

The character of Shin-Hyun, too, is also rather poorly handled: in the movie, he’s only supposed to be 22, and he definitely looks it. The problem with this is that a person this age really doesn’t have enough of an air of experience to pull of a Hannibal Lecter-style role. Once Shin-Hyun starts his pontificating for the umpteenth time, the audience begins to wonder why the thirty-something Kang doesn’t just belt this scrawny little whipper-snapper in the mouth. As a result of this, the dynamic between the two during the interrogation scenes seems very off. Making the Shin-Hyun character older definitely would have rectified this; as it is, his pseudo-Lecter pronouncements seem almost laughably unrealistic coming from a boy who’s only 22.

The movie’s other major flaw is in the “theme” it creates around the killings. As stated, the killings are all tied together in that they attack “immoral” women; however, there seems to be little point to this other than it gives the police something to go on in their work. A little psycho-babble is mentioned to explain the “motive,” though it’s completely forgettable in its brevity. What’s really a shame is that this subject matter gave the filmmakers a good opportunity to examine the roles of such women in modern-day Korean society and the perception of the society at large about what the killer(s) view to be immorality. Sadly, the victims are not characterized at all (literally—they appear and are killed); and the film’s “twist” ending, which eliminates the murderer’s motivation, leaves the film particularly ambiguous as to why these women are being targeted and how the filmmakers feel about this. I’m not saying, of course, that H should have been an elaborate statement about gender perception in Korean society, but since it is clearly stealing Se7en’s moralistic undercurrent, the least it could do would be to acknowledge it and follow it to its end by contrasting right and wrong and trying to determine at what point one can become the other. It’s replicating Se7en and Silence’s memorable elements (interviewing a madman, moralistic serial killer, “shock” ending) but ignoring their subtext that ends up making H feel like just what it is: a hollow imitation.

Well, after all that ranting, at least I can say that Tartan did a good job with presentation, though I must admit it serves as little comfort. The transfer here is just as slick as those of this film’s myriad influences (Silence..., Se7en, etc…). Indeed, it’s shocking how much this looks and sounds just like a Hollywood movie…

Extras are limited but okay. Things start off with a pretty pointless photo gallery and continue on to the film’s original trailer (in addition to various other Asia Extreme past releases and coming attractions).

Following that, we get an alternate opening that was best left as a DVD extra (it’s too quick and doesn’t fit with the pacing of the film proper) and a 22-minute making-of piece that’s too unstructured (it’s just handheld, un-narrated video clips) to be consistently entertaining, but which has its moments, even if it seems to have trouble focusing on behind-the-scenes stuff from the actual movie. (One long segment covers a promotional stunt, for instance, while another shows the filming of a scene that was deleted from the film.)

Finally, for the truly curious, things wrap up with a trio of easter eggs: the first is a very strange teaser trailer, the second a very forgettable behind the scenes clip (boxing?), and the third a very interesting behind-the-scenes clip that mixes footage of a stunt in the movie with footage of it being filmed.

Well, I’ve got to say, H drove me pretty crazy. While it starts off all right and keeps this up for a good 80 minutes or so, it nevertheless leaves too many ideas unexplored and too many holes in its internal logic to be recommendable; and it adds massive insult to this injury by throwing in a completely unrelated twist that’s the dramatic equivalent of the main characters being run over by a car while not even being in the middle of a street: sure, it’s a surprise, but it’s not really fair now, is it? This infuriating slip-up only serves to underline the film’s earlier inadequacies (which I had before been willing to overlook, in the spirit of fun), and makes for an utterly frustrating and depressing conclusion to a thriller that was doing just fine when it was playing by the rules it had set for itself.

Anyway, clearly the whole thing has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, so I suppose I’d better just leave my readership alone and go watch Hera Purple: Devil Goddess until I get my respect for Korean cinema back. Hey, it may not be great art, but at least it knows how to pull off an ending…