What Lee Suh-Goon does not lack is an assuredness of style. With more than ample confidence, she deploys the stylistics of the Hong Kong action genre – stylised slow-motion action, chic violence, an air of nonchalant cool, even effects like split-screen and anamorphic squeeze frame. And there’s a fine undertow of black comedy in the early parts – like where hero Lee Ji-Eun bursts in to declare his love for Ahn Jae-Wook just after she has conducted a hit, delivering his proclamations seemingly unconcerned about two dead bodies in the room; or the scenes (which go on far too long) with black marketeer Joshua Klausner hiring her to kill himself and then trying to rehearse a suitable set up for the killing.

Unfortunately, the film lacks any real plot to speak of. The abovementioned scenes feel like disconnected incidents. The stylishness of Lee Suh-Goon’s direction and the quirkiness of her humour keeps the film going for awhile but it is not until we get to the administering of the drug in the latter half that we gain any idea as to where the film is going. There is one scene where people previously killed turn up for a shootout at a merry-go-round that is confusing and it is only later vaguely apparent that this is a fantasy of Lee Ji-Eun’s as he writes an alternate ending for his comic-book. There is an effective ending with the heroine sitting on a bus stop with her memory blanked out as Lee Ji-Eun’s body is taken away, unaware of who he is. But the rest of the film has an irritating looseness to it. You can’t help but feel that a Western version of the film, while it would have been made as a post-Tarantino underworld cool film, could have used the same basic plot but made a far tighter and more exciting film out of it simply by adhering more closely to generic formula.