From its title, Hong-jin Na’s The Chaser suggests endeavour, not achievement – a dichotomy which the film as a project does not lay claim to. In a spin on traditional film noir, Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim) has already run foul of the law he used to serve and is an ex-detective turned pimp.

Based on a true story, the film follows the ‘hero’ in his endeavours to find one of his girls, Mi-jin Kim (Yeong-hie Seo) who he believes has been kidnapped for resale. Through numerous chases, fights and discoveries Joong-ho comes to the realisation that his girl may actually be in the hands of a murderer. Through his daughter, he learns to appreciate that Mi-jin’s life is worth to him more than her commercial value. Pursuing a smugly calm murderer through the hilly Mangwon District of Seoul, Joong-ho works against time, ineffectual policing and legal systems, as well as prejudices against his own history to seek justice and then vengeance for Mi-jin’s entrapment. He chases not just one man, but supposedly ‘the man’ whose system has entrapped both he and Mi-jin’s lives.

Identifying The Chaser in noir terms labels Joong-ho the ‘bedroom dick’. He is the man whose situation is defined by its proximity to socially-repressed rudiments, such as the sex he sells and the protest against law which his career shift indicates. An aberration to both the law-makers - who consider him worse than a murderer - and the Lacanian ‘Law of the Father’, is a classic positioning for a noir protagonist whose enterprise for money and women leads them into violence and drama. This state of both cosmos and conscience is portrayed in noir through chiaroscuro lighting, darkness and shadow creating an almost dreamlike representation of the threatening choice of mentality it signifies. It is therefore most apt that The Chaser is set mostly by night and not only is Joong-ho’s world dark, but the house which the murderer has adopted as his own is appropriately even darker.

Noir is also the castration of the male characters whose insecurities are indeed the driving and sustaining force behind the dark world we are in. There is of course the obvious factor: our murderer is revealed to be impotent and accused of using blunt objects to kill in replacement of his futile penis. However, of a more subtle emasculation is the manner in which Joong-ho and his various targets engage in violence. Far from contemporary sleek action sequences or shoot-outs, the audience is privy to a sequence of slips, breathless chases, wrestles and slaps (on one occasion Joong-ho even uses a wallet to slap the murderer!) which, for want of a better word, are distinctly ‘girly’. Hong-jin Na not only emasculates these impotent and anti-Law males but also effeminises them through these actions.

Is Na therefore mocking the males? The Law? The failure of this world which pushes a woman into prostitution for its own endurance but can not save her from the darkness of its own underbelly? In the periods when Joong-ho and the murderer are arrested, the policemen processing their statements and keeping them under guard (the Law which our protagonist has rejected and the murderer defies) is shown up to be not only ineffective and slow, but Na goes so far as to employ something similar to slapstick comedy in his derision. This is evidenced most obviously in the police station where no one seems to agree on anything, nor know how to cope with the murderer’s open admission of guilt. Arguments ensue and are only halted by the entrance of a senior officer whose presence causes everyone to stop mid-word and mid-gesture; a comic tableau punctuated with a single piece of paper floating to the ground. The law and therefore the Law are being mocked, necessitating Joong-ho’s operation outside of it. Consequently and not surprisingly ‘The Chaser’ does at one point become the prey as Joong-ho finds himself pursued by almost hundreds of clumsy policemen; the farce that is the Law trying to re-capture the man operating outside of it.

Murder and mayhem aside, for its contrariness, thrills and its pathos, this film does not just endeavour, it truly succeeds on both an entertaining and a challenging level. The use of chases in ‘real time’ without pacey backing tracks prove just as exhilarating as any action sequence. In the same vein as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Na manages to keep a slow-moving investigation through and around the characters of a dark world, captivating without too much reliance on snappy editing and rousing music. A robust performance by Yun-seok Kim and equally clever performances from the rest of the cast ensure that the audience associates with the characters, the story, the mystery and indeed the thrill that is The Chaser. It is not surprising that it succeeded as South Korea’s second-highest grossing film of 2008 and has since been picked up by Warner Bros. for a Hollywood remake. Let’s hope that the intelligence and subtleties of Na’s work are not lost in translation.