SHIM SUNG-BO: HAEMOO (2014)



Human trafficking and on board craziness

Things get a bit out of control in more ways than one in the directing debut of Shim Sung-bo, screenwriter of Memories of Murder, debut of his producer here, Bong Joon-ho. The story of a human trafficking disaster that leads to on-board chaos is well-directed as pure action, but it turns into a horror movie, and the multiple characters are hard to tell from each other, except for a romantic couple whose relationship is itself the stuff of purest fantasy.

The story begins calmly and normally enough, which is a plus: the captain of a fishing trawler who's losing money due to the financial downturn and bad luck agrees to carry a load of illegal Korean-Chinese immigrants to South Korean for a substantial fee. Only the boat is a decaying rust bucket, and neither the captain nor any of his crew has any experience of dealing with such a cargo.

Central to the action is the rookie fisherman Dong-sik (Park Yu-chun), who takes an immediate shine to the attractive young Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri) and hides her in the engine room. After a tense coast-guard inspection, things go horribly wrong for the rest of the human cargo, and as the sea fog to which the title refers rolls in, the captain goes bloodily berserk and everything gets really, really crazy and ugly.

Shim Sung-bo’s directorial debut played in competition in San Sebastian’s Official Selection and became the South Korean candidate (but not a finalist) for 2015's Best Foreign Oscar.

The screenplay is reportedly based on real events (and even relates in general terms to last November's Korean Sewol Ferry Incident), but as Shim ramps up the action, verisimilitude falls by the wayside. As a kind of unique cult-horror film with a new and all-too-close-to truth theme, however, it works, and as another example of brilliant over-the-top Korean filmmaking, Haemoo deserves passing attention.

Haemoo ("Sea Fog"), 111 mins., opened 13 August 2014 in Korean, showing at the Toronto Festival Sept. 2014, and nine or ten other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 New Directors/New Films series jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.