**½/****
written and directed by Lee Chang-hee
by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the “trophy” husband of the missing dead woman (Kim Hee-ae), who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Woo thinks Park killed his wife–which he did, using a fantasy anaesthetic untraceable after death–and has a reason to hide the body. Park, meanwhile, secretly fields taunts from his late wife that convince him she somehow survived. Because Park has connections, Woo is working against the clock to prove his guilt, and what unfolds does so over the course of one dark and stormy night in something resembling real time. The Vanished looks to be a fairly straightforward remake of a Spanish thriller unseen by me, Oriol Paulo’s 2012 The Body, which is surprising since its increasingly byzantine revenge plot feels uniquely South Korean (think Oldboy lite), as does the fluid mix of tones and genres. It’s also fairly engrossing and unpredictable, the satisfying albeit more pretentious version of John McTiernan’s forgotten whodunit Basic, in which John Travolta tries to solve a murder on a Panama military base during a hurricane: Like a lot of SK cinema, it gets a bit bathetic in the homestretch with its distended mourning of fictional characters who don’t really represent anything other than pieces on a chessboard. That being said, the whole thing might have more gravity if baby-faced Kim Sang-kyung better matched his character’s shabby profile. Some time’s gone by since he played the hotshot young partner in Bong Joon-ho’s police procedural Memories of Murder, but evidently not enough. A simple solution might’ve been not to ascribe so much world-weariness to him and instead show that the grief driving Woo isn’t something that’s made him old, but rather frozen him heartbreakingly in amber. Fantasia Fest 2018 – Programme: Selection 2018
