AFI Fest Review: Haemoo

Desperate men will go to great lengths to protect what is theirs, or to get what they believe should be theirs.  So it goes in Sung-bo Shim's grisly Haemoo, which unfolds in the midst of the IMF crisis.  Ship captain Cheol-joo (Kim Yoon-seok) can't even afford to feed his crew, so he takes on some valuable cargo: a couple dozen Chinese-Korean immigrants trying to make it to Korea.  The crew has its treipdations, but the financial situation - and the idea of having vulnerable women on board - wins out.

What follows is a shocking series of events, which I won't spoil here.  The film's title translates to "sea fog," referring to the literal fog that eerily drapes the ship, and the unknowable depths of dark humanity the various people on the ship hide.  Each of the crew is driven by something primal: a sense of justice, a thirst for power, a raging hard-on, and love are among the motivating factors.  Naturally, these are all at odds, and the chaos that results is gruesome.

Haemoo is a feast of good acting, though some of the performances (namely Lee Hee-joon as the hormone-enraged  Chang-wook) border on caricature.  The heightened emotions and the sudden acts of violence make one wonder if there's something supernatural about that fog, or if it empowers men to behave as they will, believing their sins to be hidden in the thick, rolling mist.  Either way, the film shows that one step into murky morality necessitates more, until one is running headfirst into
 pitch-black villainy.

At the heart of the turmoil is young, lovestruck Dong-sik (Park Yoochun), who stows away the beautiful Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri) in the engine room and plans to marry her upon arrival.  Any sailor knows that a woman on board is bad luck, and Hong-mae proves a particularly troublesome example, through no fault of her own.  The love story serves as a softer counterpoint to the film's grimmer scenes, and it has a gutting payoff all its own; this is no Titanic.

Haemoo is tight, the film a much better construction than the ship it centers on.  It's an exercise in excruciating tension, wondering how far these men will go, all the time the pirate adage echoing somewhere from beneath the waves: "Dead men tell no tales."  Once the stage is set and the fish hold is opened, Haemoo doesn't relent until its curiously tender epilogue; this is a film that refuses to let you off the hook.  You're as stuck on this ship as the rest of them, but luckily at a safer distance.