Fatal Intuition

Plot

Jang-woo and Eun-ji are orphaned siblings living in a small seaside town. They are very close, having only each other to rely on after their parents died. Jang-woo is saving up to move to the city so that his younger sister Eun-ji will have better opportunities once she graduates from high school. But one day Eun-ji suddenly disappears, and she turns up dead three days later, her body bruised all over and dumped in a large bucket of water at their washhouse. No witnesses and evidence to the crime can be found. Jang-woo turns to shamanism, but during the ritual to send Eun-ji's spirit to heaven in peace, he notices a suspicious man and takes the latter's behavior as Eun-ji's hint from the afterlife to find her killer.

Si-eun has been ostracized by the townspeople for her mysterious psychic ability to foresee death. She received a premonition of the death of her only friend Eun-ji, but stayed silent. Now wracked with guilt, Si-eun approaches Jang-woo to help him with the clues in her vision. She saw fragmented images related to the murder, but not the face of the killer. The duo begins tracking down a number of other murder cases suspected to have been done by the same person. Then Si-eun sees premonitions of the next target, and Jang-woo goes to the location where she predicts the murder will take place to catch the perpetrator. There, he encounters Pharmacist Min, known as the kindest person in town. Jang-woo becomes absolutely certain that the pharmacist is the serial killer, but the police refuses to investigate Min due to his upstanding reputation. Obsessed with avenging his sister, Jang-woo decides to take matters into his own hands, while Si-eun has another vision of the next murder.

Cast

Box office

Fatal Intuition was released in theaters on October 28, 2015. It opened on top of the South Korean box office, earning ₩4.87 billion (US$4.27 million) from 628,000 admissions on 681 screens over its first five days. This represents the best opening weekend for CGV Arthouse, cinema chain CJ CGV's distribution subsidiary. On its second weekend, the film grossed ₩1.18 billion, reaching ₩7.43 billion in total.

Real-life inspiration

The film is based on a true story of a female college student found dead in Busan in 1991, and her death was honored in a Cheondo ceremony. But when performing the final ritual that involves throwing rice into the sea using a bowl attached to a long piece of red fabric, the fabric stretched tight and suddenly snapped. Then the empty bowl floated back to the shore to stop in front of one young man. The father of the dead girl instinctively felt that he was the culprit, but there was no tangible evidence to prove he was.