This being the season for Oscar puffery and pretention, it’s also the time of the year when moviegoers who yearn for more action and less talk can be forgiven for thinking that what’s missing from the big screen is a good beat down. It could use one: this hasn’t been a memorable year for cinematic action, aside from a quicksilver move here and there and that gone-in-60-seconds moment in “Drive” when Ryan Gosling glides a car into park. But now there’s “The Yellow Sea,” a rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.

Even on second viewing, that bone scene is a shocker in a movie with more than one. When I first saw “The Yellow Sea” in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown under the bluntly literal title “The Murderer,” the audience burst into applause several times, jolted by the choreographed frenzy of the movie’s car and foot chases. Those chases are so exciting, and the blood is so unnerving, that I didn’t at first realize that they’re in service to a moral tale, one in which the struggle between good and evil plays out in often unsettling visual terms: that bone isn’t just a convenient weapon but also an emblem of this man-eat-dog, man-kill-man world.

Dogs, dead or furiously barking and snapping, are a recurrent motif in “The Yellow Sea,” which opens with its hapless central character, a taxi driver, Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo, subtle and moving), relating a story in voice-over. When he was young, Gu-nam says, his dog became rabid, a killer. The local villagers tried to destroy the animal, but it ran off only to return later, whereupon it lay down and died. After Gu-nam buried his dog, the elders dug it up and devoured the carcass. “The rabies that vanished has come back,” he says. “It’s going around.” On screen, a photo of an unsmiling child gives way to the adult Gu-nam losing at mah-jongg, a suggestion of generational misery.

Written and directed by Na Hong-jin, “The Yellow Sea” follows Gu-nam as he descends into a nightmare that he helps create. The story takes off in Yanji, the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, a wedge of China that borders North Korea and Russia. Initially, Gu-nam, an ethnic Korean (or chosun-juk), spends his time losing money at mahjongg, driving a cab or passed out in his squalid apartment, where a web of broken glass covering a framed wedding photo of him and his wife hints at the tragic misunderstanding that sets the story in fast, fast motion. His wife has left to find work in South Korea, and Gu-nam, bereft, angry, self-pitying, has built up a debt that he seems unlikely to work or gamble his way out of.