For nearly two decades, from Tell Me Something (1999) and Nowhere to Hide (1999) to The Wailing (2016)  the neo-noir film has been a vibrant part of South Korean cinema. A few films, such as Memories of Murder (2003) and Park Chan-wook’s “Revenge Trilogy,” have enjoyed popular and critical success. Yet as Hyangjin Lee has noted, “Western scholarship on Asian cinema tends to pay little serious attention to gangster or crime thrillers, despite the significance of the genre in the region” (118).