What happens when you cross a superhero movie with a Korean thriller? There are no costumes, no gadgets, no global crisis—just messed up personal/family lives and a ton of people die violently. Maybe that’s pigeonholing, but Haunters is proving it to be true.
In this messy superhero origin story, Kyu-nam (Ko Soo) is an unemployed nobody hired to safeguard a small office’s safe against a recurring mysterious thief, only to discover that the thief has the superpower of controlling the actions of anyone he sees. Anyone, that is, except Kyu-nam. Annoyed by this, the villain Cho-in (Kang Dong-won) attacks Kyu-nam’s good-natured boss, which pisses Kyu-nam off and sends him on a vendetta to stop this villain before he harms more people.
It’s one chase after another after that. Kyu-nam finds Cho-in, fight, escape. Cho-in finds Kyu-nam, fight, escape. These scenes have very little to them other than showing that the two characters don’t get along. They’re fun to watch, but there’s no sense of progression to them, which is death when your entire movie is entirely dependent on the gradually building rivalry of two characters. I remember what these sequences are, but not their order.
Kyu-nam is sort of director Kim Min-suk’s take-off of Unbreakable, except he handled it in a manner far less subtle than how Shyamalan handled it (think about that for a moment). It’s never said that he’s invulnerable, which is a way the film tries to mine some suspense and inspiration out of this average joe’s bullheadedness in going toe-to-toe with a supernatural foe, but unlike the off screen and more-believable-to-survive train wreck that kicks off Unbreakable, Kim shows the brutal car accident that befalls Kyu-nam. The same one he gets better from with nary a scar a few scenes later—and dismissed as luck.
This is Kim Min-suk’s directorial debut, from a screenplay written by himself. Previously, he wrote the script to Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad and the Weird—a film with a haphazard story that’s saved by Kim Jee-woon’s stylistic flourishes. That’s not the case here.
Haunters tries to be dark and affecting, with its callous dispatching of bystanders and supporting characters, and an opening scene that depicts the fucked up childhood of its villain; but it fails to convey the tone required for such subject matter. For the most part, it feels like mindless, unassuming popcorn entertainment, with broad one-note characters, cliched twists and sappy tragic developments that ring hollow. By the time the ghosts of dead loved ones appear to give our hero the perfect instruction to survive the villain’s latest death trap at just the right moment, I’ve long checked out.
