Beast, The (2019) Review

“The Beast” Theatrical Poster

Director: Lee Jung-Ho
Cast: Lee Sung-Min, Yoo Jae-Myung, Jeon Hye-Jin, Daniel Choi, Kim Ho-Jung, An Si-Ha, Lee Sang-Hee, Kim Byung-Choon, Kim Hong-Fa, Kim Young-Sung
Running Time: 130 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

While the Korean film industry has produced a number of remakes from its Asian neighbours like Japan and China over the years, more recently its increasingly found itself turning to European cinema to offer up a distinctly Korean spin on the source material. Spain has proven to be particularly fertile ground, with the likes of Hard Hit (2021), The Vanished (2018), and Door Lock (2018) all bringing box office success based on the original source materials of Retribution (2015), The Body (2012) and Sleep Tight (2011) respectively. Intimate Strangers (2018) was a remake of Italy’s Perfect Strangers (2017), and The Target (2014) cast a Korean take on France’s Point Blank (2010). In 2019 it was French cinema which once more provided the inspiration, with Olivier Marchal’s 2004 thriller 36^th Precinct receiving a Korean makeover in the form of The Beast.

Replacing Marchal in the directors’ chair is Lee Jeong-ho, a director who’s no stranger to the crime thriller, having previously helmed 2010’s Bestseller and 2013’s Broken. Here he re-teams with his leading man from Broken Lee Sung-min (The Man Standing Next, Real) and pairs him with co-star Yoo Jae-myung (Voice of Silence, Bring Me Home). Both play detectives who lead their respective units as part of the homicide division in Incheon, and when the grizzly discovery of a young girls decapitated body is uncovered in the nearby mudflats, the division chief asks them to pair up and solve the case. While the Korean thriller genre certainly isn’t short on murder mysteries, The Beast takes a decidedly different approach, with the murder element only acting as a plot device to frame a tale of human ambition, and the dark places it can lead to.

The chief is due for a promotion, which means his position as the head of homicide is expected to soon be vacant, and it’s a toss-up between Sung-min and Jae-myung as to who’s most likely to get it. While Sung-min isn’t averse to getting his hands dirty – his intel comes from shaking down drug dealers, dealing with bar madames linked to the underworld, and when needed resorting to brute force – Jae-myung on the other hand tends to do things much more by the book. The latter approach hasn’t gained much traction in the couple of weeks the case has been open though, so when Sung-min’s methods start to reap more leads, a rivalry which has always been simmering between the pair starts to take hold in increasingly obsessive and dangerous ways.

Thematically The Beast could well be considered a relative of Ryoo Seung-wan’s The Unjust, as both deal with characters who are defined by their desire to be promoted, and the depths that desire sends them spiralling into when its threatened. While Sung-min and Jae-myung share top billing, as is inevitably the case with the nature of their characters, we spend a lot more time with Sung-min than we do with Jae-myung. The release of one of his informants, who feels betrayed at the fact they had to do jail time, serves as one of the catalysts that leads to Sung-min becoming increasingly fraught as the plot progresses. Played by Jeon Hye-jin (RV: Resurrected Victims, The Merciless), her street smarts ultimately put Sung-min in a compromising situation, with his gun used to murder a drug dealer resulting in him being blackmailed to provide an alibi so Hye-jin is off the hook. 

Director Jeong-ho takes a risky approach by making Sung-min the main focus. While on paper his livewire detective may come across like a more modern take on Sol Kyung-gu’s similar character from 2002’s Public Enemy – he may not do things by the book, but he does things for the right reason – onscreen he’s far from likeable. While we initially meet him turning a low-level gangsters face into a pulp for assaulting the bar madame he receives intel from, as the narrative progresses we learn his beating wasn’t out of any sense of injustice, when later on he violently strangles the same madame himself. He’s also not averse to punching Hye-jin in the face and kicking her while she’s down in an uncomfortable alley way scene, indicating that he sees no issue with partaking in violence towards women, all of which culminate to make Sung-min a difficult protagonist to root for.

Misogyny aside, The Beast is at its best when focusing on the rivalry between the 2 detectives, as we witness the cat and mouse game that gradually unfolds. All of the locations that you’d come to expect from a Korean crime thriller are present and accounted for, with meetings and dubious dealings taking place on deserted docklands, misty woods, derelict building tops, and dimly lit bars. The bar that the madame runs is of particular note, as its customers seem to literally only consist of crumpled detectives and figures from the underworld, kind of like a crime thriller version of the Continental Hotel from the John Wick franchise. For full disclosure I haven’t seen 36^th Precinct so can’t compare the 2, however the bar scenes are undoubtably the ones which feel like a carryover from a European production, foregoing the traditional Korean bar setting involving shots of soju for glasses of Glenfiddich on the rocks.

Where The Beast stumbles is when it needs to wrap up its framing device of the murder, and introduce a more traditional villain to root against. Korean cinema has frequently fallen foul of failing to create fully developed villains in recent years, with The Witness (which also stars Lee Sung-min) being another case in point, and director Jeong-ho fails to buck the trend here. Much of the final third of the substantial 130-minute runtime is spent on catching the killer, who’s portrayed as an almost cartoon like villain, extending to his single line of dialogue. However the shift in focus to closing in on the arrest is significantly less interesting than when it was squarely on Jung-min and Jae-myung. Had they been given an equally well-rounded character to go up against, this could well have seen the closing reels shift the narrative up a gear, but as it is the lack of a compelling villain to frame a finale around sees it coast to its conclusion in neutral.

There’s a couple of other niggling negatives as well which are hard to ignore, the primary one being that Jeong-ho employs a technique at least twice where he uses flashbacks to dialogue which has been spoken literally a minute before, almost as if he lacks confidence that the visuals alone would be sufficient. In each instance it’s hard not to feel that the audience’s intelligence is being insulted, especially since we just heard what’s being spoken barely a few seconds earlier. The other is a gratuitous copy of the ‘shooting a bullet into a dead animal’ scene from 2002’s Insomnia (the Hollywood remake of the 1997 Norwegian movie of the same name, which just to make myself sound even more uncultured, I haven’t seen either!), wherein identical to Al Pacino, Sung-min frantically attempts to replace evidence with a different bullet. I’m genuinely curious to find out if this scene is one taken from the 2004 original, 36^th Precinct.

Despite these complaints though, The Beast for the most part is a solid thriller which gets by largely thanks to its premise and the stellar performances of the cast. Sung-min seems to have been told to go as over the top as he likes, which makes for some entertaining scenes as he ends up almost like a wild-eyed zombie about to succumb to his own palpitations by the end. Korean cinema has never shied away from grim endings, and Jeong-ho makes it clear that nobody is going to ride off into the sunset here, with the only character to come out clean being a new recruit to Jae-myung’s team, who makes the understandable decision to transfer back to her old unit. For everyone else, they continue to carry on living while tainted by the decisions they’ve made, or are likely laying in a pool of their own blood. If you’re looking for an uncompromising slice of Korean grittiness, then The Beast should certainly deliver.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6.5/10