A Hard Day

Detective Ko Gun-su accidentally runs over and kills a man. Instead of calling the police, he tries to hide the body, but afterward, he is pursued by a mysterious man who claims to have witnessed the incident.

While attending his mother's funeral, he receives word that an internal investigation unit is in the process of turning his office at the police station upside down, searching for evidence of embezzlement. In his rush to get there before they find what they're looking for, he accidentally runs over a man on the pitch-dark highway. This would be career suicide for a police officer, so he hastily decides to hide the body. Adding a simmering divorce and friends who can't always be trusted into the mix, there are few moments to breathe in this intense and elegant thriller from South Korea.

Kim Seong-hoon leads the audience from one nerve-wracking sequence to the next with an extraordinary, almost Hitchcockian rhythm. A noticeable professionalism permeates the entire film, occasionally at the expense of a personal connection to the characters, particularly the main character, Geon-soo. The character is interesting primarily because of his actions, not his personality. We follow a cold and calculating protagonist as he struggles through a long series of extremely uncomfortable situations, and the film mainly operates on the surface of the action. What could be seen as a lack of depth is at least adequately compensated by the hyper-realistic style and, not least, the film's soundtrack, which is, for lack of a more nuanced term, perfect.

FFS Archive 2014

Director

Kim Seong-hun (b. 1971) is a South Korean director known for film and TV. He made his directorial debut with How the Lack of Love Affects Two Men (2006) and has since directed three feature films. He also directed the Netflix series Kingdom (2019-2020).

This film is part of