Candide Orean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortless fluidity, adamant conviction and a storytelling style that can accommodate all manner of aberrations, set pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It starts out as an Ealing Comedy-type caper, then somehow something else creeps in: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the crisis of the breadwinner, and the state of the nation itself. It’s based on Donald E Westlake’s 1997 satirical horror thriller The Axe, which was previously filmed in 2005 by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated. It may not be Park’s masterpiece, but it’s the best film in the Venice competition so far.
The scene is of a perfect family home, where the man of the house, You Su (played by Korean star Lee Byung-hun), is benignly presiding over a late-summer barbecue in the garden, grilling some eels given to him by the young owners of the American paper mill where he is employed. Adorably watched by his wife Miri (played by Ye-Jin), her teenage son from a previous marriage, their daughter (a cello prodigy), and their two adorable Labradors. But these eels are actually a heartless and unfair part of the labor cost; the young US masters are going through a brutal layoff, and Man-Su is among them. He is devastated, but without the emotional language to express or understand how deep his loss has been. He is fanatically desperate to regain his manhood in the eyes of his wife, children, and pets by landing a new job in the paper industry within three months before his severance pay runs out.
But that’s not possible, so he comes up with a brilliant idea. He creates a discreet recruitment ad in a paper industry trade magazine and, with inspired cunning, Man-Su makes it clear that since the head of the paper company, committed to the product, will not accept online applications in principle; they must be on paper, using the post, thus leaving no digital trail for the crime he plans to commit. Using the personal information that these trusted applicants will send him, he will murder them all, thus creating a series of job vacancies in the case of applicants who are employed and in the case of unemployed, reducing the amount of competition.
Asked if he could try employment outside the paper industry, the man-dog stubbornly says he has “no other choice,” while the American bosses say they had “no other choice” but to cut the wage bill. Now he has “no other choice” but mass murder.
At first glance, this film looks like a serial killer comedy in the vein of Kind Hearts and Coronet, or a mercenary nightmare in the vein of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Nicole Garcia’s The Adversary. But in reality, Parks defies our expectations: Man-Su doesn’t work his way through his victim base as we might expect. In fact, he stops early. Other narrative priorities come to the fore. We discover that the house he’s in danger of losing due to mortgage default was his childhood home and the site of deep trauma involving his father, a pig farmer. (One of his victims is bundled up as compactly as a pig: a memorably nasty image.) So all of this could be only tangentially connected to his dismissal.
There are also the family’s messy subplots, which stand out from the screen as much as the bizarre campaign of murders. Miri gets a job as a hygienist, assisting a dentist who has a man under suspicion, and he immediately gets a psychosomatic toothache, which he naturally refuses to treat; the thought of his wife’s suspected lover, helped by his wife bending over his open mouth, is unthinkable. Then his son is accused of stealing cell phones from a shop owned by an unpleasant neighbor; and the son also witnesses his father doing something strange in the greenhouse, which is the setting for a sensationally bizarre dream sequence whose sheer inexplicability permeates the rest of the film.
And in all of it, the note of black comedy that knocks is never entirely absent. What on earth does it all mean? Some final, extraordinary images of high-tech papermaking and eco-traction, perhaps a gesture with meaning: Mechanization is coming, the algorithm is king, people matter less, and our human intentions and human agency are descending into distant irrelevance.
