What's fascinating about this film isn't just Song Jae-rim's final, haunting performance (though it's magnificent), but how it employs documentary techniques to tell a narrative story. The director's choice to use handheld cameras during key moments, particularly in the government office scenes, creates this unsettling sense of witnessing real corruption unfold. It's like watching a true-crime doc, except the crime is happening in real-time.
The film's most interesting stylistic choice is how it handles the cryptocurrency storyline. Instead of the usual sleek, Fincher-esque approach to financial thrillers, we get this raw, almost cinema vérité treatment. The way the camera lingers on mundane details - document timestamps, coffee-stained grant applications, flickering trading screens - builds tension in a way that feels more "Capturing the Friedmans" than "The Big Short."
Song Jae-rim (whose tragic loss still feels unreal) seems to inherently understand this documentary-narrative hybrid approach. His performance never feels performative - it's like he's being captured rather than performing. There's this incredible moment where the camera follows him through a government building, and you can't tell if it's staged or if they somehow got actual footage of a white-collar crime.
The interview-style scenes with supporting characters, spliced throughout the narrative, add this layer of authenticity that most financial thrillers miss. It's reminiscent of what Bong does with class commentary, but through a more journalistic lens.
This documentary-narrative fusion might be divisive, but it brings a fresh perspective to the Korean film landscape. It makes you question how much of this story is fiction and how much is pulled from real headlines. Whether this style becomes a new trend in Korean cinema remains to be seen, but it's certainly an interesting experiment in form.
