Tell Me Something (1999)

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Tell Me Something (1999)

Great thriller...now somebody explain it to me

This film was touted by several entertainment publications (Variety and The San Francisco Chronicle among them) as Korea's answer to David Fincher's Se7en, one of my all-time favorite films. It's got the same dark, gritty cinematography, and it's got the same lead character: Suk-Kyu Han as grizzled city detective Cho. It's even got a great story. What it doesn't have is a comprehensible story progression, leaving Tell Me Something wavering between a Lynchian-figure-it-out-yourself ouvre and a serious cultural gap between a Korean audience and the brain-rotted, Hollywood-seduced audience of the West. Like me.

Put aside the ambiguities aside: the plot is so original as to fool you into thinking its simplistic. Someone is leaving chopped-up bodies all over Seoul, only none of the body parts match with each other, leaving Detective Cho with the daunting duty of puzzling out the killer's pattern and whatever connection these bodies have with each other.

Cho soon discovers that all of the deceased had a love affair with the same woman: Chae Su-Yeon (Eun-ha Shim). As the film progresses, we learn about Su-Yeon's background and torrid love affairs, but there's never any real concrete exposition. This is both a plus and a minus: it opens the circumstances up to a considerable amount of interpretation, but at the same time it's a big old pain in the ass trying to keep up with Su-Yeon's chain of thought. One minute she's sitting in Cho's living room talking to him; the next she's seven years old getting raped and beaten by her father (or that's what I assumed, anyway--that's open to interpretation too, I guess).

Shim is nearly flawless as the gorgeous ice-queen managing to both string Cho along and keep him at an arm's length, and for the most part, the movie progresses nicely. There is a considerable amount of gore involved: the killer leaves body parts in decidedly conspicuous locations, leaving people to trip over them, drive over them or even drown themselves in them. But the ending is less than satisfactory. The plot keeps taking these hairpin turns, most of which are based on minute clues that, were I in Cho's shoes, I wouldn't look twice at. You can't tell how Cho manages to figure out where the killer's private quarters are; you can't tell what the fuck really happened in Su-Yeon's past; you can't even tell what the deal is with Cho's dead mother (who apparently had her bills paid by some shady gangster before her death, an angle that pops up in the film's first five minutes and then is permanently dropped). Moreover, if director Yoon-Hyun Chang was trying to emulate The Ususal Suspects or even Agatha Christie in his surprise ending, it would be a lot more satisfying if it was clear how Cho managed to dope the real situation out in the first place, or even what the situation is.

If you can lay such irritating details aside, Tell Me Something is much more satisfying. If you can't drop it (as I can't), you'll waste a good hour and a half of your life flipping through the DVD trying to piece it all together. Maybe that's what we're supposed to do in the first place.

-Long