The Doll Master

knightofdreamz · Thu Jun 07, 2007 6:36 pm H

H

Director: Jong-hyuk Lee

Plot Summary :
A serial killer named Shin-Hyun gives himself up to police. He confesses to committing a series of particularly horrifying murders of exclusively female victims. He is imprisoned, awaiting the death sentence for his crimes. Yet the killings do not stop. They continue with all the same characteristics trademarks of the Shin-Hyun serial killings. The case is re-opened when two more bodies are discovered, both pregnant women. One is found in the city's landfill site, and the other is horrifically murdered on a public bus. Detective Mi Yun (played by Yum Jung-Ah), and her newly appointed partner, Detective Kang (played by Ji Jin-Hee), are assigned to the case. Mi Yun and Kang have difficulty working with each other, as their personalities and working methods are constantly in conflict. Detective Kang goes about his new job buoyantly and enthusiastically. He follows a new suspect, Huh, and eventually catches him in the act of brutally murdering a woman in a crowded techno bar. Huh is taken into custody after Kang shoots and wounds him at the scene of the crime. Once again, the case seems to be solved with this spectacular arrest. Yet the murders continue in copy-cat style. The police desperately hunt for new leads. They start an in-depth investigation of a Doctor Chu, who is Shin-Hyun's psychiatrist. But progress is frustrated when Dr Chu becomes a victim of the copy-cat killings herself. The murdered psychiatrist's former boyfriend quickly becomes the prime suspect, a fanatical character named Choi. All the pieces in the mystery are finally starting to fit together, and the case seems almost resolved. But all efforts are suddenly frustrated once again, when Choi takes his own life. But still, the killings do not stop with his death. The case gets more complicated, when even the police themselves appear to become suspects in the murders. In unraveling this mystery, everyone involved is pushed to the limits of human understanding.

Cast (Credited cast) :
Jung-ah Yum... Detective Kim Mi Yun
Jin-hee Ji... Detective Kang Tae Hyun
Ji-ru Sung... Detective Park
Seung-woo Cho... Shin Hyun
Woong-ki Min... Choi Young Jin

All Title(s):
H (international)
I am... "H" (Korean)
Hypnosis (Korean)

NotoriousMDK · Fri Nov 09, 2007 5:55 am

I absolutely love this movie. The tagline of "Se7en meets Silence of the Lambs" is very fitting since there are more than a few times where it'll seem like you're watching the odd Korean lovechild of David Fincher's masterpiece thriller and the classic Anthony Hopkins vehicle. But H manages to do a lot of the stuff Se7en and Silence of the Lambs did with just enough flair and originality to seem like more than just a carbon-copy of the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman or Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins dynamic.

There's so much of this movie to like. The music, the setting, the cinematography, the first-class performances of all those involved - it all adds up to one incredibly intense movie.

If there was one gripe I have with H, it would be on a technical level: the subtitles are very uneven and really remind me of some of the horrible Japanese-to-Chinese-to-English translations often seen in second-rate bootleg conversions. Why the subtitles ended up the way they are is completely beyond me. In a way, it seems like extra care was taken to make sure the subtitles were an EXACT translation of the original dialog, and since Korean is structurally a much different language than English, there are some pretty awkward moments (I personally don't know any Korean, but I do know some Japanese, and I've been told they're actually very similar languages; if you were to do a word-for-word translation of any Japanese movie without rearranging and localizing it afterwards, it would be seriously hard to follow since sentence structure is WORLDS different than English, Spanish, French or any of the Germanic languages). But while the translation can be distracting at times, they're never enough to derail the entire movie.

I seriously can't recommend this movie enough. It might be my favorite foreign film since OldBoy, and I'm a fucking FANATIC for that one. Just watch the damn thing already.

knightofdreamz · Thu Nov 29, 2007 12:38 pm

Yea this is one hell of a movie.
More people should check this out.
Screw the internet.
Buy it.