It’s turning out to be a messy night for self-pitying Joong-ho Eom, an ex-detective turned pimp played by Yun-seok Kim (Woochi, The Yellow Sea). All his girls are going missing – and they haven’t even cleared their debts. As ineffective a detective as he is a pimp, Joong-ho at least manages to discover that – before they disappeared – the girls had all been called up by the same man. Is this fellow selling on Joong-ho’s girls? Or is something more sinister afoot? In this game of cat and mouse, you’ll never be entirely sure who is the chaser and who is the prey…

Korean crime thriller The Chaser was the assured directorial debut of Hong-jin Na and a sleeper hit success. I’d advise you to see the original before the inevitable remake (coming in 2013 by the team who brought you The Departed). Many of the trademarks of Korean films are there. The breathtakingly immersive and rich cinematography is a standard in the proactively government-funded Korean film industry. The odd twists of humour are present in the most unexpected moments, more specifically, in the satire (which at moments resorts to intentional farce) of the police enforcement system. Let’s not ignore the beautifully-crafted and often visceral violence, which in the case of The Chaser is infused with awkward schoolboyish realism to great effect. Finally, as with many examples of great Korean cinema, The Chaser boasts a plot that twists and loops like cephalopod soup, producing what westerners would think of as ‘the final act’ in the first third of the film to leave audiences genuinely guessing till the very end.

What’s best about The Chaser is that it inverts and subverts the traditional cop thriller motifs. Detective-pimp Joong-ho is one of the most satisfying antiheroes around, giving you reason to cheer and curl your lip in equal measure. His adversary, the chillingly diffident Jung-woo Ha (Young-min Jee – The Unforgiven, The Yellow Sea), is the ideal foil for a cat and mouse game that will no doubt be compared to Se7en or even Leon but is unlike anything you’ll see in a western cop thriller.

The Korean original of The Chaser came out in 2008. The 2013 Hollywood remake will, at best, be Se7en. Which is no bad thing. It will win as many high-profile awards as The Departed. It will also, I suspect, strip out the satire, the occasional moments of farce, the hyper-real violence, much of the charm… and the doubt. Western thrillers don’t, on the whole, leave much room for doubt. If you want to watch a fresh and involving dark cop thriller with charm, best to catch the original The Chaser now, then enjoy the remake as a curiousity, not the definitive…