Noir heavyweight returns with a stripped-down chase thriller in which brutality speaks its own language

In "Nocturnal," noir heavyweight Ha Jung-woo returns to familiar territory: the gritty underbelly of Korean crime thrillers where he made his name with the likes of "The Chaser" (2008) and "The Yellow Sea" (2010). His latest outing proves a curious specimen -- a chase film stripped to the bare bones, in which the most brazen plot holes in effect become aesthetic features and violence serves its own logic.
The film subscribes to the most elemental of hard-boiled tropes: The chase. Ha's Min-tae, a former gang member, pursues his sister-in-law Moon-young (Yoo Da-in), whom he suspects of murdering his younger brother. Hovering at the narrative's periphery is Ho-ryeong (Kim Nam-gil), a novelist whose recent bestseller seems to prophesy the death—a subplot that dangles tantalizingly before dissipating into the film's propulsive momentum.
Over coffee in Seoul's Samcheong-dong, Ha discusses his latest role with the same unfettered spontaneity that marks his performance—a quality, he notes, that's become increasingly rare in contemporary Korean cinema. "With multi-casting and big-budget productions becoming the norm," he says, "you often end up with films that are perfectly crafted but don't take many risks."
"Every figure serves a prescribed function, like cogs in a machine."
Ha's Min-tae defies such neat categorization. "He's violent, but I never tried to rationalize it. That's simply his mode of existence -- his violence isn't a moral choice but a form of discourse." The actor's hard-boiled portrayal bears out this philosophy -- a force that moves through scenes with the inexorable momentum of natural law, his brutality executed with spectacular resourcefulness and an almost meditative precision.
"What's interesting is that the scariest people I've met in real life are the ones who don't show their emotions," he adds. "They don't shout or glare -- they're calm, controlled and dangerous. That's what I wanted for Min-tae."

Shot on the heels of the COVID pandemic across Gangwon Province -- from the rickety stairways in back alleys to industrial dockyards -- the film eschewed studio artifice for on-location shooting. "When you're on a set, it might look good on camera, but you know it's just plywood behind you," Ha says. "This took me back to the days of 'The Yellow Sea': gritty, on-location shoots where anything could happen."
What results is a work that hurtles forward with raw momentum, its scenes blurring past like abstract impressions through the rain-streaked glass. The plot's porousness is, make no mistake, almost criminal, turning virtually every narrative device -- including Ho-ryeong's prophetic novel -- into a mere MacGuffin. Viewed strictly as genre cinema, it registers less as a coherent thriller than a nebulous cloud of brutal set pieces -- a freewheeling showcase for Ha's established noir persona.
Yet this incompleteness, less by design than accident, works in the film's favor, creating a strangely exhilarating moral vacuum where all motivations remain inscrutable and viewer's sympathy need not gain purchase. It is an amoral universe whose ruthless mechanics extend beyond Min-tae's psychopathic brutality, for no character provides sufficient ethical currency for viewers to invest in — not even Moon-young, who slips away into the night with her daughter in tow, perpetually victimized and hunted down by a circus of violent madmen.
"Min-tae grew up without parents, raising his younger brother like a father would," Ha says. "His idea of family and loyalty is twisted. He thinks protecting someone means using force, because that's all he knows."
The film, in effect, revels in destruction while remaining awkwardly bound to the structural confines of a potboiler.
In this world, Ha's stone-faced presence exists as pure abstraction rather than flesh and blood, his encounters with both gangsters and law enforcement alike yielding an endless series of consequence-free carnage.
For the film as a whole, this penchant for anarchy is certain to alienate many viewers. For Ha, that savage vitality was his constant refrain, an inspiration he seemed to grasp intuitively and embrace with genuine conviction.
"Filming was like diving into the deep end," he says, "a headlong rush without second-guessing."
"Like Min-tae himself, we simply plunged forward. That's what made it so electric."
"Nocturnal" opens in theaters Feb. 5.