TELL ME SOMETHING is a South Korean serial killer thriller, as dark and depraved as you've expect from the genre following on from the success of Fincher's SE7EN in the mid 1990s. The movie charts the adventures of a detective on the hunt for a seriously warped psychopath who leaves bin bags full of body parts lying around in various parts of the city; in an outlandishly gory set-piece early on, one of the bin bags explodes in a lift full of commuters, scattering limbs, a head and a great deal of blood everywhere.
It sounds mean and nasty and it is, with the grubby atmosphere working just fine. But as the story goes on, TELL ME SOMETHING commits a cardinal sin for this genre: there's little to no detective work going on. Characters meet and leads are followed through contrivance or coincidence rather than the painstaking putting-together of clues, and as a result the narrative drops down to a snail's pace. The movie subsequently follows the route of having the detective meeting a mysterious femme fatale linked to all the murders and from that point in it's a whodunit as the viewer strives to work out who the killer is.
The film is an odd mix of effective scenes and boring scenes. There's a lack of narrative drive to the storyline which saps away a lot of the entertainment value it should have built up, but on the other hand the grisly scenes do stick in the mind. The cast don't really make much of an impact, the characters are never fully explored and of them all, only Eun-ha Shim's sinister leading lady sticks in the mind, recalling in some ways the villainess of Takashi Miike's outrageous AUDITION. In the end it feels overlong and a twist ending is predictable rather than surprising. Try THE CHASER if you want to see the Koreans do this kind of thing perfectly.
It sounds mean and nasty and it is, with the grubby atmosphere working just fine. But as the story goes on, TELL ME SOMETHING commits a cardinal sin for this genre: there's little to no detective work going on. Characters meet and leads are followed through contrivance or coincidence rather than the painstaking putting-together of clues, and as a result the narrative drops down to a snail's pace. The movie subsequently follows the route of having the detective meeting a mysterious femme fatale linked to all the murders and from that point in it's a whodunit as the viewer strives to work out who the killer is.
The film is an odd mix of effective scenes and boring scenes. There's a lack of narrative drive to the storyline which saps away a lot of the entertainment value it should have built up, but on the other hand the grisly scenes do stick in the mind. The cast don't really make much of an impact, the characters are never fully explored and of them all, only Eun-ha Shim's sinister leading lady sticks in the mind, recalling in some ways the villainess of Takashi Miike's outrageous AUDITION. In the end it feels overlong and a twist ending is predictable rather than surprising. Try THE CHASER if you want to see the Koreans do this kind of thing perfectly.