Don’t let the multiple anti-climaxes that parade across the screen in the finale of “Escape,” a new thriller from actor turned director Lee Jong-pil (“Born to Sing,” “Samjin Company English Class”) throw you off.

Up to then, it’s a crackling getaway picture about a Korean soldier’s ever-evolving effort to defect from the North to the South, a straight-up defector genre thriller complete with sadistic cat-and-mouse games, games given added edge thanks to the strong homoerotic overtones between our cat and mouse and others.

Sgt. Lim (Lee Je-hoon, just seen in “Noryang: Deadly Sea“) is an NCO with a North Korean DMZ patrol unit, a short-timer about to muster out of the army. But he’s not just demobbing when his service is up. He’s planning on jumping across the border and escaping “Supreme Leader” and his “People’s Republic.”

We meet Lim as he slips out of the barracks in the middle of the night, using his compass, map, watch and knives to work his way through the minefields that separate the two halves of the Korean peninsula. The watch is key, as he has been dry-running this getaway for a while, edging a trail through that no man’s land, marking mines and other obstacles as he does every night he makes these forays.

A treasured childhood book he keeps with him gives away his game. Sgt. Lim read Roald Amundsen: Tenacious Explorer” and took the Norwegian polar pioneer’s lessons to heart. Amundsen was famously methodical.

“Escape” is about everything that doesn’t go according to plan as Sgt. Lim’s last day in the service approaches. First, there’s a storm coming, one which might both obscure his dash, and wash out every carefully placed marker through the minefields. Then his subordinate Kim Dyong-huk (Hong Xa-bin) spills that he’s been watching him sneaking out and knows what he’s up to.

“If you wag your tongue, I’ll cut your head off” is a pointless warning. Private Kim wants out, too. “Take me with you! (in Korean, with subtitles).”

The cautious and methodical sergeant’s plan goes to crap when the kid jumpts the gun and flees on his own. Only Sgt. Lim knows what path he took as the rest of their unit scrambles about as “Deserter Alert!” claxons and PA announcements blare.

Sgt. Lim is captured with Kim, both are tortured, and only the intervention of Comrade Field Officer, Major Lee Hyong-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) can save Sgt. Lim and get him treated like a “hero,” feted and offered promotion.

The sgt. and the urbane, sadistic and mercurial piano-playing major have history. Lim suspects, as do we, that the major knows what was really going on and is offering him a life-saving lifeline. Not that Lim wants it.

“You know how to accept your fate.”

Major Lee tempts Kim with honors at an officer’s fete, that promotion and “stay in the army” suggestion, which doesn’t sound like a suggestion. But Lim has “decided on my own future.” And no promotion, veiled threat or bleak warning about what might await him in the South will dissuade him.

He must improvise his way out of this lifeline, bluff Kim out of his death-row cell because Kim didn’t squeal on him, and trick, scheme, lie and fight his way out of the security services’ grasp and across the border using the map that’s now “evidence” that the state is holding over Kim.

Director Lee and his screenwriters depict a nearly featureless North Korea, where paranoia is ordered by edit and everybody rats on everybody else. Or else.

The hypocrisy of the State is underscored by the officer class binge-drinking and dancing to Strauss waltzes, with the venomous Major Lee famous for his piano mastery, his cunning and his savagery. His “decadence” is wholly confirmed when we see his distress at meeting not just Lim, who knows his history, but another old flame of the same-sex.

As for Lim, sometimes all it takes to bluff your way past white uniformed security police is a good pair of Aviators, or affecting the right shade of rudeness to a man of not-quite-inferior rank.

The movie strays a bit from the central storyline to introduce details that illuminate our understanding of the state of the DMZ, and to suggest there are armed dissidents in the North, “nomads” who hae lost their home, their means of living or one relative too many to the Security State aparratus.

And the ending, as I suggested at the outset, is clumsily drawn-out in ways that blunt the narrative’s impact.

But the leads are compelling, the action furious and the suspense right on the edge of riveting, which is more than enough to make this “Escape” an odyssey we want to take with these people who want to decaide their own future, rather than having a failing totalitarian state do it for them.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lee Je-hoon, Koo Kyo-hwan and Hong Xa-bin.

Credits: Directed by Lee Jong-pil, scripted by Kwon Seong-hwi and
Kim Woo-geun. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34