Pursuit of Death: The Opposite of Bromance

Imagine spending your whole life hating someone. And not just hating them but chasing them. And not just chasing them for your entire adult life but in this prolonged, decades-spanning process, sacrificing everything that really matters: Your wife, your child, your career, your reputation, your eyesight, your health... Is it worth it? It certainly doesn't appear to be in Im Kwon-taek's Pursuit of Death (a.k.a. Jagko). As the former cop (Choi Yun-seok) hounds a Communist rebel (Kim Hee-ra) across decades, only to end up widowed with stomach cancer and a limp, this film's protagonist is neither particularly sympathetic nor heroic. He's suffering from an obsession that suggests some unresolved childhood trauma but what that might be I haven't a clue.

His adversary (Kim Hee-ra) isn't much better. A roaming womanizer who contracts VD and poisons his nemesis with mercury scraped from a mirror, this guy is downright mean despite his luck with the ladies — who frankly are the only other characters that are developed at all. Pursuit of Death's focus is narrow: We meet a taxicab driver, a former fellow officer, a check-in doctor at the rehab center where the leads meet and match wits but they're all largely expendable. The musical interlude in which most of the rehab center patients sing favorite songs from their past isn't informative so much as bizarre.

Director Im has made over a hundred films in a career that spans over half a century. Some of these movies — such as Hanji and Revivre — are quite good. Others — like this one — not so much.

Iodo: Men Investigate Female Society

When a failed entrepreneur (kim Jeong-chul) mysteriously disappears off a ship headed to an island slated for ecotourist development, his drinking buddy (Choi Yun-seok) — who just happens to be a reporter! — is unfairly blamed for the death. No official inquiry takes place but the surviving journalist does feel compelled to quit his job and set his reputation aright by conducting his own unofficial investigation with his boss (Park Am) in tow. Which brings them both to a strange isle peopled almost entirely by women who have created a puzzling culture incorporating shamanism, deep-sea fishing, and necrophilia.

At first I admit I found Iodo somewhat difficult to track what with talk of frozen sperm and spirit possession casually tossed about. But by the end, I was fine with matter-of-factly accepting narrative elements such as a poorly timed sneeze and the potential powers of an incandescent infertility treatment. Can a Ponzi scheme dependent on abalone reproduction make an entire community filthy rich? Is chemical dumping or sisterly sorcery responsible for a handsome schemer's undoing? Can one woman (Kwon Mi-hye) actually strangle herself with a satin scarf? Best of all, how does her tattooed rival (Lee Hwa-shi) stiffen the limp genitals of their dead lover? (Warning: It ain't pretty!)

So many questions I'd never considered came into play in Iodo. And you know what? I was game for all of them. "It'll be doomsday. The end of human civilization," someone screams near the end of this Kim Ki-young freak show. That cry has become louder in recent years. And so this unusual concoction of sexploitation and eco-terrorism might initially register as outlandish nonsense but ends up feeling like an ahead-of-its-time warning about global apocalypse through climate change.