Three films in eighteen years. Na Hong-jin makes movies the way other people have chronic illnesses — infrequently, painfully, and with a level of bodily investment that shows in the finished product whether he wants it to or not. He debuted in 2008 with The Chaser, a film so viscerally unpleasant that it's easy to forget how disciplined it is, and hasn't managed more than one feature per half-decade since. I've made my peace with the fact that this is simply the rate at which a Na Hong-jin film gets built. What I haven't made my peace with, not fully, is how a director this rigorous keeps letting his third acts run wild on him — and how often that wildness is exactly the thing that saves the picture from being merely well-made.
The Chaser announces the whole project in its opening minutes and never really deviates from it: a disgraced ex-cop turned pimp, played by Kim Yoon-seok with the specific self-loathing of a man who knows he built his own trap, chasing down a client who has been quietly killing his girls. Na based the killer loosely on Yoo Young-chul, the "Raincoat Killer" whose crimes were still raw in the Korean public memory when the film went into production, and he shot several sequences on location around Mangwon-dong in Seoul's Mapo District rather than dressing a backlot to look poor and wet. That specificity is the whole engine of the film. It's not interested in the killer as psychology, and it isn't especially interested in Joong-ho's redemption either — what it's interested in is bureaucratic failure as a physical, spatial problem, cops and captors separated by hallways and doors and the four minutes it takes to fill out paperwork while somebody dies on the other side of a wall. The film premiered at Cannes and picked up Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Chunsa Film Art Awards, and I understand why critics reached for "instant classic" — the control is real. But I'll say what I always say about The Chaser to anyone who'll listen: the moment that has stayed with me longest isn't a violent one. It's a single wide shot of Joong-ho standing in the rain outside a house, having arrived exactly late enough, doing nothing, and that stillness does more damage than the film's actual gore ever manages to.
The Yellow Sea is the film I recommend least and think about most. Na scaled up — this was the first Korean production to fold in a Hollywood studio as co-producer, with Fox International Productions coming aboard — and the ambition shows in ways both thrilling and undisciplined. Ha Jung-woo, who played the killer in The Chaser, flips to protagonist here as Gu-nam, a Korean-Chinese cab driver from the Yanbian border region whose wife has vanished into South Korea for work and whose gambling debts get him recruited for a contract killing across the water. Kim Yoon-seok flips the other direction, from hero to monstrous crime boss. The whole structure is a mirror of the first film, and Na clearly knows it, using the inversion to say something sharper than either film says alone: that in his moral universe, position determines virtue more than character does, and nobody who crosses a border — literal or social — gets to keep whatever decency they walked in with. Gu-nam is Joseonjok, ethnically Korean but raised Chinese, belonging fully to neither, and the film's structure punishes him for that in-betweenness with a relentlessness that borders on the theological. There's a genuinely notorious behind-the-scenes fight buried in this film's history too — Na cut a leaner 140-minute international version after the rushed 157-minute Korean theatrical cut, and there's still argument among people who track this stuff about how much of that "director's cut" was actually his hand versus the studio's. I don't know that it matters for the viewing experience, except that it explains why the back third feels like it's sprinting to catch up to itself — hatchet fights spilling into hatchet fights, gang war swallowing the personal story whole. It's the least controlled thing Na has made and also contains some of the most purely kinetic filmmaking of his career, extended chase and slaughter sequences that abandon geography for velocity in a way that shouldn't work and does, right up until it doesn't. In the Ending there is a whole mute scene that is really a masterclass of storytelling.
Which brings me to The Wailing, the film that made me a Na Hong-jin person rather than someone who'd seen two of his movies. It premiered out of competition at Cannes in 2016 and had already done enormous business at home — over two million admissions within days of its Korean release — before the international press got hold of it, and I think that commercial appetite tells you something true about the film that the festival framing doesn't: this is a movie that wants to be popular entertainment and prestige dread at the same time, and mostly succeeds at both without ever quite reconciling them. It's set in Goksung, which is not an invented backdrop but Na's own grandmother's hometown, a place with a specific and, per Na himself, personally lived-in history — persecuted Catholics who fled south and were eventually martyred there, a community his family was part of. That personal thread matters, because the film's engine is less "is this village possessed" than "what does a father do when every authority he could appeal to — police procedure, folk shamanism, the church, his own instincts — turns out to be equally useless and equally plausible." Kwak Do-won's Jong-goo spends the film's back half getting steered by three separate figures, a shaman, a Japanese stranger, a woman in white, each insisting the other two are the demon, and Na refuses with real discipline to ever let the audience get more certain than Jong-goo does. That epistemological cruelty is the film's actual subject, dressed as folk horror.
It's also, structurally, the most extreme example of the thing that both draws me to N. The first act plays almost as procedural comedy — bumbling cops, a doughy protagonist, small-town rhythms — before the film tips into a register so operatic it risks tipping the whole thing over, screaming exorcism sequences, a hexing ritual staged with the pacing and cross-cutting of an action climax, grief expressed at a volume that occasionally reads more as spectacle than as feeling. I won't pretend those stretches don't test me. Na has never fully shaken a taste for the overstated gesture, the moment held two or three beats past where restraint would have hit harder. But I've come to think that's the tax you pay for access to what he's actually good at, which is not restraint at all — it's pressure.
Every film builds toward a space, physical or moral, where there is no correct decision available anymore, only worse and slightly-less-worse ones, and he holds you there in real, elapsed time rather than cutting away to spare you. When the excess lands, and often it does, it's because he's earned the release valve. When it doesn't, you're watching a very serious director briefly lose his nerve about how serious the material already is.
What actually keeps me coming back isn't the violence, which gets most of the ink in every piece written about him, English-language coverage especially. It's the rain, honestly — Na shoots weather like it's a character with its own motive, sheeting down over Mangwon-dong, over the strait between the Chinese and Korean coasts, over a mountain village that can't tell divine punishment from bad luck — and it's the way his camera keeps finding people standing very still in the middle of catastrophe, arriving exactly too late to matter, which might be the truest through-line in all three films: not that evil wins, but that by the time you understand the shape of the thing you're fighting, the fight was already over.