Overview: Five complete stranger. Five utterly ruthless criminals. All are brought together by an unknown boss to pull off a daring bank robbery which will net everyone a fortune. But when the team leader is found burned to death, suspicions arise as the remaining criminals begin to suspect each other of betrayal in this high-stakes, mind-bending crime thriller.

DVD Verdict: 'Puzzle' is a truely captivating and entertaining, as well as gripping thriller, which can keep up a high tension until the very end, and at the same time even demands of the viewer to use his grey matter. Moreover, the film once again showed me that this world isn't fair.

Director Kim Tae-kyeong put a lot of strength into hiding his script's details, which is why - and also because of a low budget, naturally - the movie didn't get much promotion. The result is that "Puzzle" didn't make it big at the box office and actually wasn't much talked about. And that's truely a shame as the film qualitywise as well as plotwise has so much more to offer than the last four korean thrillers that have recently come out put together.

Director Kim scores on several levels, delivers a great script with a lot of knotty details and twists, and narration-wise his work is also very convincing. The actual strength of the film, however, lies in the characters, which the whole story focuses on. Therefore, we are presented with three-dimensional individuals within a very short amount of time, that can bound us to our chair in no time. It has been quite a while since a thriller could win me over as much as 'Puzzle' did.

Indeed, apart from an ending that just isn't perfect, 'Puzzle' really can captivate its audience. This is mainly thanks to well done and genuine drawing of the characters, their development during the plot's course, and the fantastic actors, of whom most are unknown faces, except from Moon Sung-keun ("Princess Aurora") and Joo Jin-mo ("Wanee and Junah"). What's especially impressive is that the actors manage to bestow structure and color upon their characters within the short running time of a mere 90 minutes.

Actually, no one of them falls by the wayside. For the audience, interestingly, this means that you can't sympathize with any of them, since every one of them has something ambiguous about him, yet they are still characters you can relate to and who manage to draw you into the movie. That's what makes "Puzzle" so successful. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs, and comes with the Special Features of:

Actor Interviews
Behind-The-Scenes Featurette
Making of the Music Score