Kim Roe-ha

The first time Detective Cho Yong-koo meets a suspect in Memories of Murder (2003), he runs at him and drop-kicks him. Bong Joon-ho stages it like slapstick, and Kim Roe-ha plays it that way too: a man doing something absurd with complete conviction, as if the flying kick were a standard part of the procedure. We laughed. The man on the floor is Baek Kwang-ho, whom Park No-sik plays as a frightened child in a grown body, and by the second kick we felt sick and a little ashamed of the first laugh. That is Kim's gift, or the part of it we have seen up close: he is funny and appalling in one movement, and he never signals which one he thinks he is being.

The career around that kick is a working actor's. He began in theatre in 1989 and in short films from 1994, and came to features in 1998 with Whispering Corridors among others. Bong cast him in his debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), in a part billed only as Shadow Man, then in Memories of Murder, and a third time in The Host (2006), where the credit reads Yellow Suit at Funeral. Between them came a jailer in Save the Green Planet (2003) and the gangster Moon-seok in Kim Jee-woon's A Bittersweet Life (2005). Since then he has kept up a steady run of supporting parts in film and television into the 2020s, and kept up the stage work alongside, including portrayals of historical figures.

The pattern is plain. He is cast as detectives, gangsters and officials, the intense or authoritative men who stand at the edge of a scene and make it a little more dangerous. He is good at it, and directors know it, which is exactly the problem: a face that reads as menace gets asked for menace, and the filmographies list him in secondary roles nearly every time. Bong is the director who has done most with him, because Bong is interested in what happens when the frightening man is also a fool. Cho is not a villain. He is a bad detective who believes he is a good one, and Kim gives him a wounded dignity that makes the kicking worse, not better.

We should be honest about the size of our evidence. We have reviewed one of his films, and it happens to be one of the best of its kind we know, so he arrives on this page with the wind behind him. Whether the gangster in A Bittersweet Life or the jailer in Save the Green Planet have the same double edge we cannot say; the reputation suggests presence, not much more.

Start with Memories of Murder, then, and watch the kick. Watch what his face is doing while his feet are in the air. Korean cinema has found plenty of uses for that face over three decades; it has not often asked what else is behind it.