“I was going away with him because he was the nicest person that I’d ever met…and because I’m lonely.” So says a wistful Lizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning (1947), recalling a romance predicated on emotional need rather than mutual desire. Scott may well have been describing Lee Sang-Il’s Villain whose characters, the products of an increasingly isolated internet age, think nothing of getting in a stranger’s car and sleeping with the driver in order to banish their chronic sense of loneliness.

Sat alone in his car, the solitary Yuichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is first seen watching a mobile phone video of Yoshino in her underwear, a pretty girl he met on an online internet dating site who, it is hinted at, only arranged to meet him so she could gain sexual experience before embarking on a love affair with Masuo, the archetypal playboy cum bastard.

Whilst phone camera technology allows Yuichi to pine over her privately, for Masuo it acts as a tool of public humiliation, mocking her flirtatious emails in public for entertainment. In case that wasn’t enough to convince the audience Masuo is beneath contempt, he later gives Yoshino a hard shoulder to cry on by literally kicking her out of his car. It’s the last time she’s seen alive but, as events transpire, the identity and the motive of the killer isn’t quite as clear cut as it seems.

Set in a Japan where the young are incapable of making it through dinner without technological interference or committing a benign act of cruelty, ‘Villain’s’ primary concerns are with a society in which “folks have no-one they care about”. It doesn’t take long to be persuaded by this worldview.

The pantomime villain, Masuo, leaves a restaurant by telling the proprietor, “thanks, that was crap” while later, in one of the film’s many arbitrary plot fillers, a grandmother is relieved of her life savings by a merciless con artist. In this context, the tragic murder of a young woman isn’t entirely illogical when the natural order of things is otherwise a pervasive heartlessness.

Not that everyone amounts to pure concentrated evil. When Yuichi arranges a meet with Mitsuyo (Eri Fukatsu), a desperately lonely shop assistant, he finally appears to encounter someone capable of reciprocating love. However, in the film’s best executed scene, Yuichi’s supposedly good nature suddenly peels back when a hotel tryst skirts dangerously close to rape, throwing the assumption of his innocence into serious doubt.

An undulating narrative of flashbacks and revelations, ‘Villain’ begins to falter at the point character study shifts towards sentimental melodrama. Despite a claustrophobic sound design and capable direction, after an opening credit sequence that borrows heavily from ‘Vertigo’-era Bernard Hermann any promise of a gripping psychological thriller is soon dashed by questionable acting and predictable plotting.

‘Villain’ is ultimately hampered by its bloated running time. Had an editor enforced a stricter diet, the shedding of 40 minutes might have made for a prettier figure.