Secret: Marital Stressors

Does a person ever recover from being responsible for his own child's death? Detective Kim Sung-yeol (Cha Seung-won) got his daughter killed while drunk driving and chatting on the phone. Years later, not only does the guilt mess with his head but it's also undermining an ongoing investigation. What's the crime? A better question might be, what isn't? The list is long! Plus, nowadays, there's nothing that he won't do since he's already done the worst. What's ratting on your partner (Park Won-sang) compared to filicide? What's covering clues implicating your wife (Song Yun-ah) next to hiding your own culpability? Nothing, especially in a world where...

Criminals swing by the police headquarters to compare notes. Blackmailers dress up as clowns and sell chocolate. Former coworkers reunite despite a history of betrayal. Cops buy cake for a suspect's mother. The illogic goes even further: A junkie is brought to a live concert to identify a potential murderer (instead of someone showing that same addict a photo); a random man on his cellphone is accosted because a cop thinks that he must be the caller (as if everyone didn't own a cellphone). When Kim stopped to help a lady in a wheelchair despite being pursued by Jackal (Ryu Seung-ryong) and his muscle, I thought, that too is dumb. Motivation here is — as the title puts it — Secret at best? I guess writer-director Yun Je-gu knows the answer(s). He can keep them to himself.

Face: Heart of a Stranger Skips a Beat

I'd never contemplated how upsetting it might be to discover that the life-saving heart which your daughter received as a transplant ended up being just one of many blood-pumping organs harvested by a serial killer working in conjunction with a shady cardiologist. Director Yoo Sang-gon and his fellow screenwriters don't grapple with that troubling thought either, though they might have since that's a key component of the horror flick Face. You can hardly blame the film's protagonist (Shin Hyeon-jun) for having other things on his mind since he's constantly distracted by piercings sounds, dirty-haired ghosts, and a comely assistant (Song Yun-ah) who can't keep her hands off his...clay. You see, he's an artist who recreates the faces of dead people after the forensics lab drops off the skulls. It's not an easy way to make a living but even when his daughter's in the hospital, this job is addictive. You've got to get it just right so that the computer knows which hair style to add. Why does the serial killer target women? Because they've got bigger hearts, silly. Now if the demand was for fresh livers, then we'd have some equal opportunity mass murdering going on.