Here’s a Korean thriller ready made for a Hollywood remake.
A detective is summoned away from his mother’s funeral by a panicked call from his office. Internal Affairs is onto the squad-wide bribery and they’re all in the deep stink.
His sister is nagging him to be “a good son” and get to the funeral. She’s using his little girl in the nagging.
His wife has a “We need to talk” moment. That’s never good.
And then, distracted by a cute dog, he hits somebody with his car — kills him. He has to stuff the body into the trunk and dispose of it, running police sobriety checkpoints, accident investigators, his own squad’s interest in the missing dead man, along with finding a way to explain the car damage, his tardiness, all of it.
Kim Seong-hoon’s “A Hard Day” has its share of tense moments — Will Detective Go (Lee Sun-kyun) trip up here, or there? — spread out over 110 somewhat leisurely minutes.
The grabber moments — smuggling the body into a funeral home, using a cop’s wiles to foil surveillance cameras — are spaced out more than one would like. The script is tighter than the direction and editing. 
But the set-pieces dazzle (think Korean war toys) and the performances by the cops have a nice cynicism about them. If Hollywood isn’t in a scrum for the remake rights to this one, somebody’s missing the boat.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lee Sun-kyun Lee, Jeong Man-shik, Jo Jin-woong
Credits: Directed by Seong-hoon Kim, script by Seong-hoon Kim,
Hae-jun Lee . A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:51