Tell Me Something leaps with great relish into the gory details of the killings. The opening image is of a body being cut up and throughout it offers up a good deal more grimly realistic gore than any other serial killer thriller – a supporting character is impaled with a forklift, a bag of body parts is splattered all over a freeway overpass and in one great image a group of kids kick a bag left by a mall elevator, unleashing a torrent of gore and severed heads.

But for all that it never quite works with the darkly intensive grip in the back of the soul the way Se7en did, the way tv’s Millennium (1996-9), or even an inferior Se7en copy like 8MM (1999) did. Rather Tell Me Something seems stuck at turning standard psycho-thriller conventions, swinging suspicion onto various characters, before offering a twist ending that goes against what we have been led to think. There’s disappointingly little here that isn’t directly out of Thriller Scripting Class for Beginners #101. And there are times when the threads of connection are not clear either – one failed to work out what the significance of the buttons and the photo found at the killer’s apartment was, nor quite why the photo of Sung-Min’s car suddenly becomes a vital clue.

Director Chang Yoon-Hyun shoots almost the entire film by rain – you might get the impression that the sun never emerges from behind cloud cover in Seoul – and crafts the the beautiful Shim Eun-ha as an enigmatically aloof presence at the heart of the film. But despite an earnest effort, he never really tightens the film enough to hold one enrapt and all that ultimately keeps it moving is a rather formulaic plot.