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| Actor Cho Jin-woong in the scene of "Bluebeard" / Courtesy of Lotte Entertainment |
By Kim Jae-heun
Popular Korean thriller movies have featured intelligent psychopaths as serial killers. These characters manage to keep the tension through to the end of the film by continuing their cruel murders amid unrelenting detectives chasing them. It increases the excitement for the audience trying to predict who the killer is amid many suspicious candidates appearing in the movie.
However, the upcoming Korean psychological thriller "Bluebeard" reveals the murderer early in the movie but manages to keep the tension throughout, letting the audience see how the leading character Seung-hoon (played by Cho Jin-woong) breaks down mentally.
Spring is often taken as a new start for the year. However, it's also the time when most corpses disposed of in the Han River float to the surface; and director Lee Soo-yeon took the idea for her movie from this. At the same time, she watched a popular video on YouTube titled "Why you should not receive sleep endoscopy." An unconscious patient in the video showed all sorts of odd behavior and said things he would not if he was awake.
Doctor Seung-hoon gets a loan and opens his own clinic in Gangnam, Seoul, one of the richest suburbs of the city. But his business fails and he finds a job as a contract doctor at a hospital located on the outskirts of the city.
One day, an old man visits him for an endoscopic examination under sedation and he speaks gruesome words that remind Seung-hoon of a recent news item about a headless female corpse found in the Han River. Under sedation, the patient says "arms and legs are under the Hannam Bridge and the body is under the Dongho Bridge." To make matters worse, the old man is the father of Seung-hoon's landlord. It is then Seung-hoon gets terrified and starts to suspect the exceptionally kind old man and his son. Meanwhile, his wife suddenly goes missing.
Actor Cho said he went to great efforts to play a type of character he never portrayed before.
"I have acted mostly as gangsters or dumb bunnies until now," said Cho during a press conference at the Lotte Cinema in Gwangjin-gu, eastern Seoul, last Friday. "In shot every sequences thinking it they are my last ones.
"While watching the movie today, I felt satisfied that the character was portrayed in the way I intended. He was a loser," said Cho.
Cho also lost some 17 kilograms to fit into his terrified character bombarded with death threats.
The actor said he enjoyed shooting an action scene where he battles for his life with a butcher shop owner Sung-geun (played by Kim Dae-myung) -- another murder suspect in the film.
"In most of the action scenes, it is common that you get bruised easily. Our team did a really good job in decorating the butcher shop set and it really was full of the smellof butchered. When I fought in the scene, I did my best," said Cho.
"Bluebeard" hits theaters today.
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