Review of Kim Jae-hoon’s film “In the Body of a Killer”

The debut of South Korean director Kim Jae-hoon, “In the Body of a Killer,” has been released. Meat thriller puzzled Mikhail Trofimenkov: the police heroes behave even more disgustingly than the maniacs they are pursuing, and the director enjoys violence worse than the authors of snuff-movies, underground films with real torture and murder, exposed by him.

In the original, the film is called artlessly: “Demons.” And translating its name into Russian would be worth the immortal quote from the film “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession”: “Walled up, demons!” Because in the body of the killer Ja Jin Hyuk (Jang Dong Yoon), the demons of the modern metropolis are the ones who walled up the brain of the valiant policeman Choi Jae Hwan (Oh Dae Hwan). Well, or vice versa.

The director, who attempted an almost lawless remake of John Woo’s film “Face/Off,” seems to have not fully figured out who immured whom and in whose body. Completely confused, he dragged into the mystical intrigue some secret CIA technologies from almost the time of the Korean War of the early 1950s – hello to the legendary thriller by John Frankenheimer “The Manchurian Candidate”. You can stop talking about the main intrigue here by focusing on the details.

A gang of maniacs has appeared in Seoul. Covered in ghoulish fluorescent makeup, they dismember kidnapped girls live on air – their snuff looks like videos from an amateur heavy metal garage band from some South Dakota. Tired operas are following the gang’s trail: the star of the task force is the same Choi.

The film is interesting not only and not so much for its action scenes. Well, they cut off someone’s ears in close-up, they gouge out someone’s eyes, they saw off their arms and legs, they hang them upside down and prepare them for cutting. How many streams of cranberry juice have we seen on the screen?

More interesting is the modus operandi of the Seoul police created by Kim Jae-hoon. We are somehow accustomed to imagining South Korea as a strictly regulated, hierarchical country, a police state – in the sense of law-abidingness. Kim mercilessly destroys this image against her will.

Not a single order from the operative’s superiors is carried out. They tell the guy not to meddle in the lair of maniacs, but to guard the entrance until help arrives: no, he will definitely run into a deliberate ambush and will touchingly wheeze with his cut throat, saying goodbye to his comrades. Kim Min Sun (Jang Jae Ho) will report to the boss that so and so, he walked around the suburbs here with a wanted maniac and killed someone. The boss will smile tiredly: they say, don’t do that again, son, go get some sleep. The search for the missing Choi by the reinforced police squads is impressive. The cop battalion wanders through the forest, lazily raking heaps of fallen leaves. No, they didn’t find it under this tree. And they didn’t find it in this rabbit hole either. Can we go home?

But that’s not so bad. Having captured an undoubted gang member, the heroes do not take him for interrogation to police headquarters, but process him on the spot. The treatment includes not only electric shock torture, but also the vulgar driving of nails into the kneecaps. Hey guys, is this possible? Such methods do not evoke the slightest moral – even if, at worst, hypocritically formal – condemnation of either the superiors of the torturers or the director himself. We are not talking about the real practice of torture, which, obviously, not a single police force in the world disdains. We are talking about treating torture as an acceptable practice.

It is pointless to wonder whether the director considers the police to be as evil a force as crime. No, he doesn’t think so: his goods must come with his fists. Let’s say.

But then another question inexorably arises. For Kim Jae-hoon, snuff authors who enjoy dismemberment are evil spirits towards whom any approach is acceptable. But doesn’t he himself enjoy all these nails crunching into bones and other self-mutilation? And why is he better then than his luminous ghouls?