Yellow Sea Trailer

South Korean director Na Hong-jin raised the bar for intelligent action thrillers with his pulsating debut feature The Chaser (2008). He returns with knives out for a powerhouse follow-up -- one primed for success East and West, as it's the first Korean film ever to be financed by Hollywood. Hugely ambitious and masterfully wrought, The Yellow Sea is a tour de force of gritty urban storytelling and brutal action, elevating the glorious excesses of the best Asian genre fare to the level of epic tragedy.

Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo) leads a squalid existence in China's crime-ridden Korean autonomous zone. He hasn't heard from his wife since she fled for Seoul six months before, and he's struggling with a ruinous gambling habit. Then colorful, wisecracking gangster Myun (Kim Yun-seok) offers Gu-nam an escape from his misery: all he has to do is travel to Seoul and kill a man.

Starting with a harrowing journey in the hold of a cargo ship across the sea of the title, Gu-nam is plunged into a dark odyssey filled with violence and pain. The contract kill goes haywire, setting off a chaotic gang war and a massive manhunt for the (mostly) innocent Gu-nam; but the more he seeks redemption, the more he finds himself trapped in the corrupt underbelly of Korean society, learning to survive by killing, and filled with remorse.

Na finds a perfect balance between Hitchcockian suspense, wicked black humor, slam-bang action and melancholy drama. The impressively textured production design is a purgatorial vision of garbage-strewn, fluorescent-lit slums; and the bravura chase sequences and bloody knife-and-axe fights have to be seen to be believed.