In both the real 2005 case and the 2019 film, the police are incompetent. They cannot catch the killer because they are trapped by their own bureaucracy—they look for motives, patterns, and connections. A random serial killer who attacks strangers is their nightmare.

In the pantheon of modern Korean cinema, few films blend brutal action with moral ambiguity as deftly as Lee Won-tae’s 2019 masterpiece, The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (Korean title: Akinjeon ). Starring the legendary Ma Dong-seok (also known as Don Lee) as a crime boss and Kim Moo-yul as a rogue detective, the film delivers a visceral cat-and-mouse game where the lines between law enforcement and organized crime vanish completely.

The 2019 South Korean action-thriller The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil is one of those movies where the plot feels so wild it has to be fiction. The idea of a powerful crime boss teaming up with a gritty detective to hunt down a serial killer sounds like a classic Hollywood high-concept pitch.