The crime drama “Howling” is the film adaptation of a Japanese novel by female writer Wasa Nonami. The original novel, roughly translated as “Frozen Fangs,” pivots around a female detective who comes to empathize with a mysterious wolf-like creature that has been raised as a murder weapon. While the Korean film is true to the original work on the whole, a great deal of weight is also given to a male protagonist, played by versatile actor Song Kang-ho.

Here’s the plot. Ambitious detective Sang-gil can’t wait to get a promotion. He is upset when he takes on an insignificant suicide case where a man immolated himself. He becomes more frustrated as he is ordered to work with a female rookie named Eun-young. Sang-gil thinks that the victim was, in fact, murdered by a sophisticated lighting device, while his partner Eun-young notices animal tooth marks on the body. Soon after, another murder involving a beast is reported. The pair of detectives suspect that it is a serial murder case.

Although Eun-young, the only female detective on her team, is greeted with scorn by her male colleagues all the time, she manages to discover that the murder victims had known each other and underage sex trafficking is involved in the case. She also finds out that the victims were all killed by a giant wolf-like dog that was raised by a former police dog trainer. It turns out the trainer’s young daughter had fallen victim to child prostitution by a sex trafficking gang. The heartbroken, revenge-obsessed father trained his wolf-dog to kill the gang members. As trained, the loyal dog has been hunting down the perpetrators and kills them one after another. Now, Eun-young chases the animal to save both the last remaining perpetrator and the wolf-dog.

Many film critics note that the action-thriller is basically about the socially marginalized, with an inexperienced female detective featured as the lead character. The former patrol woman finds herself becoming a complete outsider in her new team simply because she is the only female member. The divorcee lacks feminine charm, which makes her even more unpopular with her macho coworkers. According to director Yoo Ha, even the wolf-dog, which isn’t exactly a dog but isn’t a wolf, either, symbolizes a minority stuck in the middle. In the movie, Eun-young suffers discrimination, rude jokes and even sexual harassment by her colleagues. But it is the female detective herself who finds an important clue to the case, which other veteran cops fail to notice.

The film brings to light “male violence” that is widespread in society through child sex trafficking—the cause of the brutal serial murders—and the discrimination the heroine endures in the workplace. It is a modern detective movie, but it uses a rather primitive subject of the “wolf-dog.” It also ranges across a wide emotional spectrum, which doesn’t seem to be a typical element for a crime thriller, but certainly appeals to female audiences. The disparate elements are mixed well together, just like the beast in the movie that has both the barbarity of a wolf and the friendless of a faithful dog.