The Chaser

My lovely wife bought me a huge pile of movies for Christmas, and I finally got around to watching The Chaser the other morning, a huge hit in it's native Korea a couple of years ago. I've maintained for a while now that the Korean's are making the most essential cinema on Earth at the moment, and this fantastic film hasn't changed my opinion

Joong Ho is an ex cop turned pimp, running a stable of girls, but business is going downhill as the girls keep disapearing. Convinced that someone is selling the girls on to a third party, he forces young, working mom Mi-jin to meet with a strange client who he suspects is responsible, go to his house, call on her cellphone and let him have the address so he can confront him. And the plan is going well, right up until the point that (a) Mi-jin can't get a signal, and (b) it turns out the strange client is actually a killer. The whereabouts of the missing girls? The land surrounding the house. Through a genius twist our killer is apprehended (this is within the first half hour), confesses, and Mi-Jin is captured but alive, but lack of evidence and police red-tape mean that Joong Ho has 12 hours to find Mi-jin before the killer is released back into society to finish what he started

From there The Chaser takes off into a truly exceptional thriller that breaks all the cliches and conventions of a tired genre and reminds you just how stale and contrived the Hollywood system has become. The team that produced The Departed have picked this up for a remake, but seek out the original as soon as you can, because I can guarantee any remake will be a watered down, dickless version of the original. It's currently on Amazon for a fiver and you would be insane not pick a copy up at that price. I loved this movie. Here's a trailer: