A Hard Day

A Hard Day starts in standard fashion with a hurried, harried protagonist navigating several escalating situations, the film striving to set a scene deserving of its title. The aesthetics match the narrative, an ominous score enunciating every tense turn, with accompanying scenes shot in inky darkness and edited with energy. It appears that a conventional thriller is afoot, and writer/director Kim Song-hun (How the Lack of Love Affects Two Men) could have easily laid his concept to rest there, eking out another addition to the burgeoning faction of his nation’s similar efforts. Thankfully, his offering to the genre swiftly proves anything but formulaic or ordinary, relishing the unapologetically manic and absurd in its rendering of its content.

Detective lieutenant Ko Gun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon) is the seemingly non-descript antihero of the piece, rushing from preparations for his mother’s funeral to deal with the repercussions of his often illicit style of police work. He swerves to avoid hitting a dog on the road, only to careen over a man instead – and rather than calling the authorities, he takes the body with him to cover up the incident. Endeavours to dispose of the evidence while making his final farewells are problematic, all the more so as he attempts to avoid the scrutiny of the internal affairs department at the same time. The complications keep on coming, of course, spanning corruption, coincidences and more in a tale that won’t let its trickery rest or its lead character earn even a moment’s respite.

Relentlessness is part of the joy of A Hard Day, its plot bustling along with an exuberance that doesn’t know when to – or simply doesn’t want to – come to a halt. Any exhilarating turn the film could take, it does, without a care for anything other than its own mischievous tone and flexible sense of logic. The minutiae is anarchically inventive, using a children’s toy to move a body, and alighting at a great height only to land in the thick of the action, for example. Narrative mechanisms ripple with cheekiness, teasing out the most inevitable developments with unbridled glee, and relishing the bait-and-switch of genre expectations in moments designed to make viewers jump. Even the broader strokes in theme and approach revel in the playful juxtapositions and subversions, flitting from contemplating traditional funerary rites to appropriating every bad cop trope, and showing a father’s protective instincts as well as a criminal’s survival instincts.

Indeed, A Hard Day is perhaps best described as a cartoonish comedy of errors in which there is no end to the depths it dives into, and that’s by no means a derogatory statement. Song-hun directs the ample action with comic sensibilities; while watching anxiously to see what violent fate potentially awaits Gun-su next as he spirals through his several levels of hell, the audience is simultaneously enjoying frequent, full and hearty laughs. The earnestness of their combination is also refreshing, avoiding ironic interpretations and too-clever dialogue in favour of simply having fun. The terse becomes the ridiculous, and the silly becomes the sublime, the whole package never anything but pulsating and gratifying.

That character is of little importance is by no means surprising, nor is the lack of variety in performance, but both suit the story from start to finish. Playing it straight is the only way the cast, particularly Sun-kyun, could make the movie work, and a wide range of emotional deviation is wholly unneeded given the bent of the material. Again, the success of A Hard Day comes from its spirited embrace of everything it is and everything it is not – always offbeat, never serious, and using its technical construction to heighten the former over the latter. South Korean crime efforts may be plentiful, but rarely have they been as entertaining, or as satisfyingly over the top.