H

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For his first and only long-running movie, Lee Jong-hyuk gets a more than satisfying result with this thriller both psychological and horrific. As the cover of this DVD is right to indicate, "H" is a mixture of "SE7EN" and "THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS", however keeping its typically Korean touch, where sobriety and realism can be found, even if some elements stay nevertheless very Occidentalised, in particular about the technical means of a bit too high quality which the Korean police owns...

The story begins with several murders of women wildly mutilated. Right from the beginning, the most bloody and sordid details aren't missing. The first victim is found in a dump, her foetus drawn from the uterus, the second one has her throat cut, lies in her own blood on a bus seat... Detectives Kim and Kang are in charge of the investigation, and the clues crosschecking would quickly direct them towards Shin Hyun, an imprisoned serial killer, judged some time before for strangely similar crimes. We, of course, keep in mind Anthony Hopkins's interpretation of Hannibal Lecter, and Cho Seung-woo doesn't seem really believable in his part of a manipulative psychopath who destabilizes the detectives with disconcerting ability.
While the arrests multiply, the murders continue. And these last are done with a strange ferocity, a kind of macabre ritual which rhythm is the menstrual cycle calendar, and perpetuated on pregnant women to feed a distance vengeance, which motivations you'll find out about later...

The first scenes give the tone of a very dark movie, with nightly and rainy atmospheres, which seem to be the reflection of the tortured souls of the two main characters. On the one hand, we have Kim Mi Yun, embodied by Yum Jung-ah (the terrible step mother in "TALES OF TWO SISTERS"), consumed by the recent death of her fiancé in mysterious circumstances during the investigation leading to Shin Hyun; on the other hand, Tae Hyun, a novice, impulsive and sometimes awkward detective, who will find in himself a quite worrying dark side falling more and more into madness...

Less innovative than "MEMORIES OF MURDER", but more thought of than more recent Benny Chan's "HEROIC DUO", "H" had nothing revolutionary, but succeeds in keeping a kind of suspense to the end, proposing quite a well-done plot. The title, quite enigmatic, will seem clearer to you...

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