Ha Jung-woo

In The Chaser (2008), Ha Jung-woo plays a serial killer without overstatement. He makes the violence believable without insisting that we notice the acting. We value that restraint in someone so often cast as dangerous or morally compromised men. He commits himself physically to those roles and makes the characters seem like people who could exist.

That was his breakthrough, and his reunion with director Na Hong-jin in The Yellow Sea (2010) put his physical intensity to further use. Leading roles across thrillers and action films followed during the 2010s, but Tunnel (2016) gives a useful measure of what else he brings. As Lee Jung-soo, he supplies an ordinary man's charm and humour within a survival story. He need not be frightening to hold our attention.

Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (2016), in which he plays Count Fujiwara, is the film we would send people to first. It is a clever, funny erotic thriller, with a camera occasionally too pleased with what it can show, and Ha's naturalistic presence is useful in a film so busy with plotting. We were moved by the romance because Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri keep it alive through all that cleverness. They supply the feeling, and a fair account of Ha's place here has to leave them that credit. This is a recommendation for seeing him within a carefully judged cast, not for expecting the film to belong to him.

The reservation is with the material rather than the effort. Kundo: Age of the Rampant (2014) suggests the limit of familiar genre plotting: keeping an actor busy does not necessarily give a film much to say. We would like more parts that draw on the humour apparent in Tunnel, rather than simply asking him to withstand the next ordeal. Try that after The Handmaiden if the forbidding roles are all that come to mind.