Park Chan-wook tries to compete with another perversely satisfying ‘thriller’

You have no other choiceOn the new film, it is in this sense a more contained and less exuberant artifact than the others on it thrillersas Grandfather (2003) or A little girl (2016), but it still proceeds as it does perfect clock mechanism which at the same time seemed to constantly doubt its functioning. Ahí es conde que se su fascinación.

It is based on certain stereotypes noirA Korean sets in motion a relationship that has always been on the verge of falling apart. The drama is part affirmation, the protagonist Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a paper-making expert who, rewarded with a perfect family, a happy home and work success, tells his wife, “I’ll keep everything.” The act followed, step to work and everything is done to desmoronarse.

Corralled by the two, unable to get the job done, he decides to target all the candidates one by one for a very specific job (his job) at the new company. Park Chan-wook is interested in the subject not so much as a dramatic story (which miraculously unfolds) or as an excuse to put his true obsession into form: we explain how Man is essentially a predator.

The filmmaker sees the stage door as if he were sitting on a table. A bad move or miscalculation leads to jaque mate. So the characters between pathéticos and extrafalarios, they enter and ascend the floor like some characters with a superior logic unknown even to others. They are caught in a language that explains the Korean that surpasses them, in which desire is also to blame.

Nothing is casual: a reflection in the glass, a slight shift to the side, a closed door with too little space… everything is a sign of emotional punctuation that creates an effect. Thus, the story is encapsulated in its own labyrinth with a sense of elegance, which, moreover, is not overcome by the abruptness of some decisions. All acts of violence, if they appear, are carried out in a dry form, in administrative cases.

As it happens in the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock or in the work of Brian de Palma, with poetic themes the Korean undoubtedly has a special affinity, yes perversely placental algo in the form in which the story is answered in the same way. About dynamic action from the reflection of one’s own limitations and one’s own truthfulness thriller. A trivial conversation, a conversation outside the room, can be transformed into a scene of latent amusement by a change of light or camera movement.

The itinerary of a family man turned desperate killer doesn’t want to be a mess until the moment each person and also the viewer discovers uncomfortable aspects yes i mean The feeling of fate, from the first minutes of the exclusive oasis, is a constant, a sentence always expressed at the expense of all possible alternatives.

Park Chan-wook goes to show off his para talent convert spaces into states of mind. Impersonal residences, crystal clear workshops, underground apartments or a leafy winter garden are emotional territories before simple decorations. By the author The decision to leave (2022), where the conjugal nest was also a source of perversion, represented a surgical ability to remove anxiety from the places its creatures inhabit.

There is a filmmaker here without embargo he logrado tamed baroque excess his previous filmography. What matters is not the stagnation, but the previous tension: the way their creatures think and act with a politeness that makes them pathological. The essential is always hidden on the surface of beaks.

The department approaches the task with admirable precision. Lee Byung-hun plays a running man who finds out late that he is not in control of his destiny fragility, tenderness and hardness which resulted in any heroic temptation. Often before her, her mother Miri (Son Ye-jin) offers herself out of her mysterious ambiguity as a catalyst for an uncontrollable destiny.

The problem here is the emotional distance of as much surgical perfection in forms between the table and the observer as a Korean would wish to be placed in the place of an entomologist. In truth, all their films invite us to do so Observe their creation as bichos more camouflaged than human beings.

From this story, the movie he sleeps more than ever, he fascinates more of what is comfortable. About existential pessimism, he claims that every decision is predestined. This fatalism with what the director Lady Vengeance (2005) was always coqueteado, if here konvierte in pure discourse, cases in doctrine.

The title acts as a warning that the story is determined to confirm at one time or another and to hermetically seal everything the book contains, so that the narrative immediately turns to plastic decisionin Mechanical Engineering and Choreography.

We cannot forget that as viewers we are also the conejillos of Indiaand one of the greatest stylists of contemporary cinema which in its legacy considers cinematography as a certain dictate of manipulation.

Once we overcome the situation, we are extinguished by the energy we breathe in certain sequences, such as the energy of the night chase brought to life by the reflections in the rear-view mirrors and the humor that appears in the most brutal moments. Hallamos placer-like algo, Once again, to see how there really is no other option in this male star architect’s universe.