The Witness

Returning drunk to his newly purchased Gwacheon apartment late at night, middle-aged Han Sang-hoon (Lee Sung-min) witnesses a baseball-capped man (Kwak Si-yang) battering a woman to death in the street below. Dogged police detective Jang Jae-yeob (Kim Sang-ho) is on the case, and needs someone who can identify the wily perpetrator - but Sang-hoon keeps quiet about what he has seen, terrified of exposing his wife Soo-jin (Jin Kyung) or young daughter Eun-ji (Park Bom) to reprisals from the murderer. As other witnesses are viciously attacked, Sang-hoon will learn that selfishness brings deadly consequences. In a country where civilisation is never far from the wilds, Cho Kyu-jang’s (serial) killer thriller uses cat-and-mouse tropes to hammer home its dispiriting picture of bourgeois, educated Koreans more concerned with the prices of private property than with the values of social responsibility.