★★★★☆
A Girl at My Door (Dohui-ya). South Korea (2014). Written and directed by July Jung / Cinematography by Hyun Seok Kim / Edited by Young-lim Lee. Starring Doona Bae / Sae-ron Kim, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Jin-gu.

The pint-sized Chichester International Film Festival consistently punches above its weight, among other riches in its twenty-fourth year, three outstanding police and detective thrillers from 2014, all of which go well beyond the merely procedural. Alberto Rodriguez’ Marshland puts a murder investigation in a moody landscape with a backstory from the Franco era; in Ramil Salakhutdinov’s A White White Night, a detective’s missing-person search in St Petersburg is constantly diverted by tales of the city; and in July Jung’s expressive A Girl at My Door, procedure has all but disappeared, replaced in this South Korean story by a mercurial relationship between a disgraced policewoman and an abused teenager in a forlorn fishing town.

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