The Unjust

Screened at the 2011 Fantasia Film Festival.

The Unjust, a deeply strange crime noir from Korea, pits two detestable antiheroes against each other in a battle as violent as it is… bureaucratic. Its lead characters are a prosecutor and a cop, both attempting to plod through a botched investigation to find and bring to justice a serial killer preying on young women. But both have ulterior motives, and both are in thrall to various high-powered interests whom the truth doesn’t necessarily serve.

Ryoo Seung-Wan’s movie is fast-paced and dramatic, with frequent explosions of action and brutality. But its best moments are the most mundane: the prosecutor (self-servingly) trying to convince his boss that the suspect they have in custody is the wrong guy because he insists he didn’t do it; a character, at a pivotal point in the film, trying to avoid his supervisor by hiding in his desk chair (that one you kind of have to see). The Unjust is unwieldy — it ends at least five times, and gets a bit moralistic in the last few endings — but it’s ceaselessly interesting and masterfully made.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2011
Genres:	Crime, Drama, Action
Starring:	Dog-gi Woo, Dong-seok Ma, Ho-jin Jeon, Hae-jun Yu, Seung-beom Ryu, Jeong-min Hwang
Directed by:	Seung-Wan Ryoo
Screenwriters:	Hoon-Jung Park
Rated:	UR