Tell Me Something (1999)

The Korean film "Tell Me Something" was released in an age when the television crime drama had developed nearly to the point of it's big screen equivalent.  It's a problem all police procedural movies face at the turn of the century as the budgets and production values of television was on the rise in general.  Good cop movies will have increased the quality or quantity of their product in some ways.  Some applied a more complex psychological study of it's characters than a 50 minute time slot would allow, some utilize their large budgets for spectacular scenes of car chases and/or explosions, and some overcompensate by flooding their frames with excessive gore.  "Tell Me Something" aspires to all three, but only fully succeeds in it's display of frank mutilation.

Detective Cho (Suk-gyu Han) is reeling from both the death of his mother and accusations of bribery.  To make amends with his superiors he is given a tough case in the form of a car containing parts of several people that has been left on the side of a road.  The situation rapidly escalates upon the appearances of two more garbage bags containing various body parts at random locations.  At this point the theory of Karma induced me to wonder if the man started taking kickbacks at the age of 5. 

The detective and his partner, Oh (Hang-seon Jang), are promptly led to Chae Su-Yeon (Shim Eun-Ha), a woman who appears to be a former lover of the initial victims. Before we know it we also have two suspects in the form of acquaintances of Chae, her friend Seungmin Oh (Jung-ah Yum) and an apparent male stalker named Kim Ki-yeon (Jung-sang Yu), both of whom are proficient medical students.  Of course this list actually makes 3 suspects as my mother, whom I viewed the movie with, observed.  Furthermore, it might say something about a film when members of the audience can point at a character in the first 15 minutes of a film and proclaim "you are so dead!".  Ah the joys of home movie-going.

What's truly frustrating about the film is that it has prepared two completely different possible scenarios for a psychological motivation, but then buries them under contrivances that keep us too busy to appreciate lost causes.  There's a difference between letting the viewer draw the lines between the dots of a mystery and hacking out sections of a story so that the viewer has to draw in completely new dots.

Thrillers like this remind me of that scene in the princess bride where the self proclaimed criminal mastermind ponders the question of which of the two cups before him is poisoned.  He stalls, "An intelligent person would presume possibility one, but as you know that I know you are intelligent then I cannot possibly choose possibility one, but it's also possible that you knew that I know that you know that I'm an intelligent person..." ...and so on, and so on.  In the end, the simple questions that could have been so easily excised from the feature overpower any appreciation you could have for the script's ingenuities.  But I suppose the filmmaker's had to justify their theatre feature with it's length.

Would the movie not have been over much quicker if the police had bothered to look at the tapes from the hidden cameras the moment they found them?

Would the movie not have been over much quicker if they had bothered to ascertain and search the room the films first death had apparently fell out of?

Would the movie not have been over quicker if the crime scene investigators had bothered to look inside a compartment with bloody prints all over it?

Or the ever present, what if the guy by himself would just turn around at the right moment? 

Beyond these discomforts one will find a solidly made film.  Director Yoon-Hyun Chang has a calm discipline and while never seat gripping with suspense his camera is attentive to its subjects and never distracting.  Even his use of Enya and Nick Cave might seem unsuited at first, but upon repeated viewings actually grew on this reviewer.  The writing of is calm and functional, but never witty or memorable (even though the credits list 5 contributors).  I'm not asking for a Mamet play, but the dialogue is so exposition filling in areas that it begins to read like a history book.  The actors are the lot that survive the best, with our lead pair and even the side characters all subtly working their way through the film, convincing us that not one of them had as much trouble with the script that so many viewers have.  

Is this a truly mediocre film?  Surely so.  Is it a truly great television episode?  Surely so.

-Rafael Servantez

Notes on the DVD

This review is based on the Rx DVD.  Image and sound delivery are good, subtitles are well written and removable.  Extras are sparse with Korean commentary, trailers and a single making of documentary.  I really need to get a better setup so I can say something more than "it doesn't suck!".

Critical Analysis

After seeing the film I poked around the internet and found that there were many takes on the unseen events in the film.  I don't believe any of these points will make me forgive the unrelenting storytelling style of the movie, or the oversights of a few of the characters, but here is what I believe to be the best possible explanations discussed on various message boards..

-The first boy coming in through the window was a thief, not an intended victim, this is evident by the fact that his brother seems to be skilled in the art of breaking and entering.  The police accuse him of being a thief at his beginning when interviewing his brother in the background.  Why Chae kept his button and left behind the key to that apartment in her own is unknown, except to the mechanics of the plot.  Furthermore, considering the windows to that building didn't really have ledges, one has to ask how he got up there to surprise her in the first place.

-The motivation for Chae would logically be her distrust/hatred of men stemming from the abuse by her father.  The men she dated, then later had killed, were like him in that they were artists and philosophy majors.

-Chae's 1st accomplices.  Seungmin is obviously the boy from her childhood as she has the same scars from the fire.  Seungmin has always felt sympathy for Chae and therefore is willing to kill the victims (when Chae is being watched) and later frame herself for the murders so Chae isn't caught.  She remains silent in her death scene hoping the cop would shoot her.  I can't tell if the adult Seungmin is supposed to be a boy in girls clothing, or if Chae told Cho her childhood friend was a boy to confuse him.

-The body in the tank at the end was apparently in some form of preservative, implicating Kim, the man supposedly obsessed with her that was questioned about purchasing a chemical preservative.  The body itself is thought by some to be of her father, but looking closer you can see it is the stitched together pieces of past victims and many believe that Chae was trying to make the "perfect" man, if headless.

-Chae's 2nd accomplice.  Why Kim became involved is unexplained, though if he was really obsessed with her she may have been able to use that to her advantage.  If he wasn't then it is presumed Chae placed the photos of herself in the building that he owned to implicate him, but I believe he was simply the murderer of the first few victims.  This would denote a certain amount of trust on her part though, considering Kim ends up dead one might think this contradicts the idea that Chae doesn't kill Cho because he is "nice to her", but then that trust would have been broken after the discovery of the hidden cameras.  Either way it appears to be his face we see for a moment at the beginning when someone enters the art studio apartment, though it's not clear who let him in.

-In the end Chae doesn't try to kill Cho because he seems to be a man who actually cares for her (she gives him the hearing fish, also seen in the photo at the end in the same kind of container all the future victims had).  Some think he was going to be killed because of the drawings she made of his head, but it seems preferred the drawings were made out of admiration.  This makes sense because if the others were killed simply for being witnesses Chae would try to kill Cho too, so the others must have been killed for not just being men, but being men she'd cultivated mistrust for and/or seen shades of her father in.

-...But therein lies the last piece of speculation.  May seem to think all 6 were involved in her father's death, meaning Chae had convinced all 5 to help her.  I find it more likely they were just there to celebrate the instillation of what must've been a damn expensive fish tank.  I could nitpick and ask who is it that took the picture if they're all there, but let's just stop here and say it was a damn tripod...

-I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing when the unneeded "explanation" section is bigger than the actual review...