This is the third Korean thriller I’ve seen in the last year wherein a male novelist and a book he wrote figure significantly in the mystery, except that in the case of Nocturnal (also the title of the fictional book) the novelist plot thread is utterly superfluous and seems to have been dropped into the script just to make it more complicated, because the basic story is a boilerplate gangster revenge procedural with nothing distinctive to offer. 

Ha Jung-woo plays Min-tae, a former gang enforcer who does a prison stint after violently defending his ne’er-do-well younger brother from other gangsters. After release he does “odd jobs” for others, including a bunch of laborers who are being stiffed by their employer. Through carefully inserted flashbacks we learn how, prior to being sent up river, Min-tae got his brother, Seok-tae (Park Jong-hwan), a job in the gang he was working for, though the gang boss, Chang-mo (Jung Man-sik), seems to have taken him on more as a favor to Min-tae than for any confidence he has in Seok-tae’s talents, which are minimal. Even worse, Seok-tae’s a junkie, and the movie starts with elliptical scenes of his escaping a house where he apparently killed the son of a police chief he was selling drugs to. Shortly thereafter, Seok-tae’s body is found in a pond. Min-tae puts on his detective cap and brushes off his trusty lead pipe—his weapon of choice—and goes about trying to locate Seok-tae’s live-in girlfriend, Moon-young (Yoo Da-in), who was said to have been with him when he died. Also on Moon-young’s trail is the novelist Kang Ho-ryeong (Kim Nam-gil), whose bestseller is based on interviews with Moon-young that predicted Seok-tae’s demise at her hands. And, of course, the police are also looking into the murders, so as these three elements pursue the missing girlfriend and her young daughter, Min-tae keeps running up against gangsters with vested interests in the matter, thus occasioning several Old Boy-style one-against-many fight scenes, not to mention the requisite car chase and pursuit-on-foot through narrow alleyways. 

The only compelling aspect of the movie is Min-tae’s conflicted purposes: Will he really kill Moon-young if he thinks she killed Seok-tae, and why would he want to get revenge for a brother who, by all reports, was a lowlife scumbag in the first place? Writer-director Kim Jin-hwang isn’t very generous with the explanations on these counts, and with the pointless novelist subplot constantly intruding on the action, eventually the movie becomes incoherent as an action thriller. Granted, Kim can stage fights and chases that are as good as anyone’s, but that stuff has become so conventional it’s hard to be impressed any more.

In Korean. Opens Sept. 12 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

Nocturnal home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Barunson E&A, Eulji Creative, Sanai PIctures Co. Ltd.