The Murderer, action at Un Certain Regard

Three years after competing in the Caméra d’Or with The Chaser, NA Hong-jin, who has been taken on by Fox, has become one of the most brilliant representatives of young Korean cinema. He is coming back to Cannes with an ambitious action thriller, The Murderer, presented in Un Certain Regard.

His film, The Chaser, won numerous international awards in 2008, thanks to its refined sense of narrative and a fast and dynamic mise en scène. It also convinced Fox to invest in him, and Na Hong-jin wasted no time putting that financial backing to good use. With ambition and extreme precision, he immediately launched his second project, calling back his actors, HA Jung-woo and KIM Yun-seok, reconnecting with his chief camera man and his editor, and launching an adventure that would take over 300 days, 170 of which were spent shooting. 250 action scenes and more than 5,000 frames later, The Murderer emerged as the very first Korean film to be coproduced by a major Hollywood studio. 

Gu-nam, a taxi driver, leads a miserable life in Yanji, the Chinese city sandwiched between North Korea and Russia. For six months, he has had no news from his wife, who left for South Korea to find work. Myun, a local godfather, offers to repay his gambling debts and to help get him across the border into Korea to find his wife. In exchange, he has to murder a stranger.
“I wanted the rhythm of the film to be frantic, moving quickly from one shot to the next,” the young director said, referring to the chase scenes and the spectacular stunt work. According to the actors, The Murderer goes beyond a thriller. Na Hong-Jin has built his dramaturgy around the solitude of a character who is prey to an intimate struggle. The director achieves a degree of realism and an attention to detail that is unique in Korean cinema.

The film will be screened at 10 p.m., Salle Debussy.

V.V.E.