Jang-woo (musical/TV actor Joo Won) works at an ice factory in a small Southeastern coastal town. Struggling to make do with a perky younger sister Eun-ji (Ryoo Hye-young, Ingtoogi) as his charge, he decides to sell his parent’s property and relocate to Seoul with her. Then tragically, one night Eun-ji disappears. However, a strange incident during a shamanistic ritual leads him to believe that a local teenage psychic Si-eun (Lee Yoo-young,
The Treacherous) holds clues to the identity of the criminal.
Fatal Intuition is neither a proper who-dun-it mystery, nor a socially conscious, satirical thriller in the mold of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder. It is in essence a psychological horror film that uses the murder-mystery plot as a chassis onto which is hung profoundly unnerving and realistically ugly depictions of the evils of small-town Korea.
Director Yun Jun-hyung is at his best when he smokes out the sense of something-is-not-quite-right uneasiness, or an atmosphere of soul-crushing patriarchal repression, out of the desolation and colorful decrepitude of the environment. This oppressive yet neon-hued ambience is the film’s key strength and ends up far more effective in conferring the film a consistent tone of dread and desperation than it’s overcooked.
The writers try hard to weave together various thriller motifs into a taut narrative, but are only partly successful. Frustratingly, even though some of the twists make sense only if the viewer accepts the overt presence of the supernatural, Yun himself seems reluctant to acknowledge it.
Aside from the police captain, a snarky and incompetent jackass (Seo Hyun-woo), and Eun-ji, all the major characters in Fatal Intuition are obsessives of one kind or another. Although Joo Won does a good job exuding grief, determination and rage as the avenging brother Jang-woo, his character is such a macho cretin (his attitude toward his sister is rather insufferable, if not creepy) that I found myself unable to sympathize with him.
Si-eun is an interesting “psychic” character, reminiscent of “spiritually sensitive” female victims in Dario Argento gialli, but aside from her intriguing visions, she is essentially a shrinking wallflower, certainly no one’s idea of a feminist heroine.
This leaves Yoo Hae-jin (Tazza: The Hidden Card), the superb character actor, to dominate the movie as one of the more interesting Korean cinematic villains in recent memory.
Usually known for boisterous comic relief characters, Yoo here brings quiet, restrained menace to the role of the pharmacist Min, the prime suspect in the eyes of Jang-woo. Ironically, he looks and sounds so “normal” amidst the obsessed townies that viewers begin to find him psychologically “off.” Yoo easily makes his calm confrontation with Joo Won in the police station the film’s most shocking and best-acted scene, by expertly playing off Joo’s explosive rage.
Production values are good to excellent.
The film’s settings (such as the weirdly jerry-rigged laundromat lined with menacingly vibrating, blunt-headed washing machines, and the uber-creepy abandoned mansion in which the tense climax takes place) possess believably despondent yet slightly surrealistic qualities. The film’s darkly luminous gel lighting is also reminiscent of 1970s and 1980s European horror.
Fatal Intuition is not entirely satisfactory as a mystery thriller, but it is worth watching for its unusually powerful atmosphere of dread and desperation, partly fueled by Southeastern Korea’s zombified patriarchal ideology, and by Yoo Hae-jin’s thoughtful performance, an outstanding example of how not to play a typical movie psycho.