The first minute of Yoon Jong-seok’s convoluted thriller, based on the Spanish movie Contratiempo, neatly sets up the basic story. Powerful IT entrepreneur Min-ho (So Ji-sub) has been arrested for the murder of his mistress but is released due to the machinations of his even more powerful father-in-law and retreats to a family-owned vacation home in the woods to lay low amidst the media furor. To anyone who has seen any crime-related Korean films of the last 20 years the sentiment is immediately recognizable: rich people can get away with anything. However, Yoon intensifies this sentiment by sending in a high-profile criminal attorney named Yang (Kim Yunjin), who drops by the vacation home, at night and in the middle of a blizzard, saying she has been retained by Min-ho’s family to represent him on the case, which just became more complicated after she learns that prosecutors found a witness to the crime. She is sure that she can fend off this threat, but needs Min-ho, who claims innocence, to tell her the truth surrounding the murder as far as he knows it. Once she understands that, she will know how to proceed.

The complication here is crucial to Yoon’s purposes, which is not only to show how the wealthy can do whatever they want, but also how they have the resources to invent their own truths, since Yang clearly states that whatever Min-ho says—even if he admits to having murdered his lover, Se-hee (Nana)—she will come up with a story that guarantees his exoneration. What ensues is a series of 4 narratives, all dramatized as flashbacks, that explain what may have led to the murder in a sealed hotel room and how it was carried out. Though the stories change as the dynamic between lawyer and potential client shifts through the night, Yoon keeps a tight grip on the particulars so that each narrative remains distinct and clear, with its own set of implications and conclusions. It’s a clever balancing act that demonstrates his skills at storytelling, but in the end the entire premise of having not one but two unreliable narrators in the same room working against each other undermines the integrity of the overall plot as it devolves into a mess of implausibilities. 

The obvious purpose is to keep the viewer constantly second-guessing the stories being told, but in the end what I ended up doubting was the characters themselves as characters, whose motives became clear even as the resulting actions became more and more contrived. Nobody demands realistic situations from a thriller like this, but within the world depicted they should at least make internal sense. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

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