Kwak Do-won

He started with parts that barely had names. The charcoal fire man in Mother, a detective in The Man from Nowhere, a Blue House investigator in The Berlin File: for years he was the face in the second row of Korean crime cinema. Recognition came from supporting work in The Yellow Sea and Nameless Gangster, where he played men whose authority was a costume they were not quite wearing correctly.

That is his specialty, and it is a narrow one done extremely well. Korean cinema runs on institutional men, prosecutors, agents, party officials, senior detectives, and Kwak plays them as bureaucrats first and tough guys a distant second. Cha Dong-yeong in The Attorney, Kim Cha-in in Asura: The City of Madness, Kwak Cheol-woo in Steel Rain and its sequel, Park Yong-gak in The Man Standing Next, Shim Hyeok-soo in The Mayor, Moon Ki-beom in The Shameless. He sweats convincingly, which sounds like a joke and is not: the anxiety underneath the rank is the thing he is hired for.

The Wailing is the exception and the peak. As Jong-goo, a rural policeman investigating something he has no framework for, he spends the film being wrong, frightened and out of his depth, and he holds a long and punishing horror picture together by refusing to become competent. It is a very unusual thing for a lead to do and almost nobody else would have risked it. Nothing else on this list asks as much of him, and nothing else shows as clearly what he can do when a director trusts him with the centre of the frame.