H sets up its enigmatic premise with a gruesome style and intensity, and keeps it going through out the entire film.
The movie starts with a grisly discovery at a garbage dump, a woman’s body, a dead baby, and an umbilical cord she bit off with her teeth. Soon afterwards, another woman is found strangled aboard a bus with her stomach torn open and the fetus’ foot sticking out, and police recognize that there’s a serial killer on the loose. They also recognize the killer m.o., but the problem is that he’s been behind bars for ten months for an identical set of crimes. They’ve got a copy cat on their hands.
Impetuous Detective Kang, played by Jin-hee Ji, goes to confront the first killer, Shin Hyun, in prison. “I’ll ask you simply,” he says, trying the direct approach. “Who the fuck is it?”
Shin, played by Seung-woo Cho, enjoying this little paradox, gives him a lot of spiritual mumbo-jumbo in return. Arranging the pictures of his own victims in some aesthetic order that make sense only inside his own mind, Shin speaks of hearing them speak from beyond as if it’s an ethereal music that only he is privy to. “When you are facing the abyss, don’t forget that you are facing yourself,” he warns the detective.
“Crazy bastard,” exclaims Kang, and he’s right.
Kang and his partner Kim, played by Jung-ah Yum, go off on an odyssey that features more murders, severed body parts, two-bit gangsters, a blood-splattered basement, a medical technician fired for stealing his bosses’ scalpels, and an unsettling psychologist who smiles pathologically when discussing her patients’ killing sprees.
Somehow the whole twisty mystery seems to involve a latticework of interrelated impossiblities, timed according to a woman’s menstrual cycle. In time, perhaps, answers will be revealed.
“This is a case where waiting is required,” Kim cautions Kang but he wants none of it. It’s hard to say whether all the elements of this mystery are resolved by the end or whether some of them were thrown in just to creep you out. The movie’s stated solution is one that was pretty much in front of your eyes all along, and it seems certain that some of the puzzle pieces have been allowed to fall under the table. It’s certainly not the first time the “Wait, the killer is already in jail!” story has been told, nor is it the first time the writer/director has found this way out of the box. But if only in terms of intrigue and atmosphere, “H” is an absorbing piece of entertainment that’s intelligently made.
