V.I.P.

The son of a senior North Korean official is a serial killer. He is smuggled south and goes on killing there. But the man is an intelligence asset, and the South Korean service, the CIA and contacts in the North have all agreed to protect him. The only person trying to catch him is a homicide detective. The subject is not the serial killer but the chain of protection. Everyone in the film knows what he has done and each has a separate reason to shield him; what is narrated is the institutional silence around the crime rather than the crime. The form is cold and split, moving between four points of view and doubling back in time. The production was harshly criticised in Korea. Almost every woman in it exists only as a victim, and the length and detail of the killings were judged to exceed anything the film was trying to say; the argument fed a wider debate at the time about how women were represented in Korean genre cinema. Park Hoon-jung directs. Kim Myung-min plays the detective, Jang Dong-gun the intelligence officer and Lee Jong-suk the killer. Who it is for: viewers who like hard Korean crime cinema and stories of institutional cover-up. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by detailed on-screen violence against women; those passages are long and the film does not soften them.