Even in the crowded playing field of the Korean crime genre, ‘Dark Figure of Crime’, with its near-faultless performances, assured direction and technical craft, stands out as a responsible, intelligent, and emotionally moving piece of work.
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A high-stakes battle of wits ensues between detective and perpetrator in director Kim Tae-kyun’s refreshing crime thriller ‘Dark Figure of Crime’. Kim Yoon-seok of ‘The Chaser’ fame plays police detective Kim Hyung-min, a man who seems to have seen too much of the underbelly of society and wears a permanently weary and haunted look. But that does not put a dent in his dogged pursuit of justice.
At the start of the film, Kim meets Kang Tae-oh, convincingly played by Along with the Gods’ Ju Ji-hoon, a junkie who confesses to having helped bury a corpse. Their meeting is violently interrupted when police show up to arrest him for the murder of his girlfriend. Now behind bars, Kang, for unknown reasons, confesses to having murdered seven people. These are unreported murders, and the title of the film ‘dark figure of crime’ refers to a term used by criminologists for the number of such unreported or undiscovered crime that remain off the books of official record.
In order to formally charge Kang, Kim requires substantial evidence from Kang, which Kang provides only in exchange for money and luxuries. But it turns out that Kang is a very unreliable narrator. His tips misleads Kim and sends him scurrying about in circles, and we slowly find out the true motive for Kim’s apparent readiness to confess.
Downplaying the typical troupes of the crime genre such as action set pieces and tense faceoffs between detective and perpetrator, director Kim opts for grounded psychological and procedural realism and an uncommon compassion for the film’s victims’ families. This is no surprise when one finds out that the film is based on the true story of the detective who, till today, is still searching for the identities of the victims.
Even in the crowded playing field of the Korean crime genre, ‘Dark Figure of Crime’, with its near-faultless performances, assured direction and technical craft, stands out as a responsible, intelligent, and emotionally moving piece of work.
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