Detective Ko Gun-soo (Lee Sun-kyun) is supposed to be at his mother's funeral, but things have gotten somewhat hectic and he is currently speeding along an empty highway on his phone to his sister, who he lives with along with his young daughter, having been estranged from his wife. Once he has just about placated them both, he is about to turn his attention back to the road when suddenly something appears in his path: a small dog. He swerves to avoid it and is congratulating himself for doing so when equally suddenly his car hits a figure who blunders into him. Skidding to a halt, he is horrified to see, on getting out, that the man is dead, and he cannot afford a scandal...
The global appreciation of South Korean crime thrillers continued in the twenty-first century with this twist-laden effort from writer and director Kim Seong-hun who took a basic plot that had been done many times before, most scene-setting in film noir, and added action and a particularly grim sense of humour, though it was not strictly a comedy. The question it posed was nothing new either, asking what happens when a corrupt man meets his match in another who is even more immoral than him? The answer was that he turns from the narrative's anti-hero into the hero thanks to the audience's sympathies shifting away from the victims of Ko's bad behaviour at work.
And unexpectedly towards Ko himself. Amusingly, the whole movie was meant to take place over the course of a day, the coda aside perhaps, which meant this was one super-eventful twenty-four hours. Lee played his detective role initially as arrogant - he gets stopped for drunk driving and fights the arresting officers until he can prove he is who he says he is, then is very nasty to them indeed when they were only doing their jobs and he was definitely acting suspiciously. There is a reason for that, which is the body stashed in the back of his car, the same one he ran over and now wants to bury somewhere to hide the evidence of his wrongdoing and recklessness - he has a plan.
That plan is the old "hide the body in a coffin already used by another corpse" trick, only with a very sick twist in that he takes it to the funeral home his mother has been prepared for burial in and stashes it in her casket, though only after a highly entertaining bit of suspense where we don't know if he will get away with this or not. Naturally, he does not, though not because of what you might expect as the tone changes from a bad man trying to cover his own ass to a worse man trying to exploit the situation he has been landed in. His colleague, Detective Choi (Jeong Man-sik), is a better sleuth than he wants him to be and keeps discovering evidence that is slowly yet inexorably pointing towards Ko, stuff like the security camera footage taken nearby the scene of accident that, if enhanced, could expose him.
This could have been grim, but Kim turns the screws on his protagonist with undisguised glee, and after a while that enjoyment becomes infectious as the audience cottons on to what he is up to. When Ko starts receiving phone calls at the station from a mystery man (Jo Jin-woong) who appears to be well aware of what crime he has committed, and also how turn that to the mystery man's advantage, the picture becomes more Hitchcockian as the director staged action setpieces that did not necessarily go the way you anticipate: a foot chase that looks to be about to turn into an extended action sequences ends after about a minute when the pursued collapses down a flight of stairs and the pursuer runs out of breath, a realistic note in what is often a stylised genre, and one arranged for maximum sardonic chuckles. This drew its threads together for an extremely tense finale, claustrophobically performed violence in a single apartment high above the ground, with a Terminator-esque, unstoppable villain. It may not seem much at the beginning, but A Hard Day paid off its careful set-up with grotesque aplomb. Music by Mok Young-Jin.
