No Other Choice: The Cruelty of Capitalism

The Americans make a brief appearance at the start of auteur Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice. They're a group of cold-hearted businessmen who have come to South Korea to dramatically downsize the devoted staff of a paper company, loyalty be damned. It's clear that Park finds the heartless "money first, people second" ethos as reprehensible. His anti-hero Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), however, doesn't necessarily agree. Or if he does, he certainly gets over it quick enough as he strategizes how he might get back into a high-paying job in his industry, in light of such ruthlessness. His plan: Kill, kill, kill.

Since this is a Park film, Man-su's deadly serious determination becomes horrifically literal as he systematically identifies who the competition before murdering them one by one. Changing professions is not an option. Selling the family home is not an option either. Competing as an equal has not worked in his favor so far. For him, offing his rivals is the best bet. As the title states, he has "no other choice." [His loyal wife Miri (an excellent Son Ye-jin) is more flexible as well as more adaptable but she's not driving the plot.] Once Man-su's masterplan kicks into action, the killings are quirky more than grisly: a shoe salesman gets twisted into a ball as if he were a bonsai tree; another rival (Park Hee-soon) is buried up to his neck after a night of excessive drinking; a third (Lee Sung-min) is fatally shot by his own wife (Yeom Hye-ran), a histrionic actress who's in the midst of a shallow love affair. Park's film may not have the constant cliffhangers of his earlier works like Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but No Other Choice is nevertheless a powerful indictment of unchecked capitalism gone mad, both here and abroad.

Uprising: Directorial Signatures

Park Chan-wook co-wrote Uprising and there are times when you can definitely feel his signature touch on this historical epic of class rebellion: the sadistic whippings of a young boy's calves, the repeated motif of a knife piercing a hand, the final bloody duel in an engulfing fog — a swordfight that involves three men, not two. But Uprising is actually a Kim Sang-man movie which means if you're hoping for the intricate and delirious perversity that inhabits so many of Park's film, you're going to be a little bit disappointed. In truth, I found Uprising sometimes confusing for whereas Park always manages to juggle multiple storylines effortlessly, Kim's interweaving of tales had me repeatedly having to resituate myself as to whether I were in the present or the past.

The central story is compelling, however. Two childhood friends — one a mid-ranking nobleman (Park Jeong-min / Jin Jae-hee), one a slave (Gang Dong-won / Lee Yoon-sang) — are unable to truly meet as equals in a society ruled by an insensitive king (an especially effective Cha Seung-won), despite the BFFs repeated attempts to do so. Instead, they're often pitted against each other even when a common enemy emerges: the nose-hacking Japanese general (Jung Sung-il) whose Joseon-era brutality is like a harbinger of the 20th-century horrors to come. The final resolution isn't a predictable one. Which I credit to Park who's always full of surprises.

Decision to Leave: Deadly Details

Park Chan-wook's films always have such humorously quirky details. In Decision to Leave, there's a handheld electric massager, the home health aide's clear plastic apron, the cop's ingenious chainmail glove, a Martin Beck crime novel, and the audio translator that switches the voice from female to male when it goes from Chinese to Korean... Of course, all of that would mean nothing if Park didn't bring that same attentiveness to narrative as well. And like many Park movies, Decision to Leave has a complicated plot to pair with these elements.

When a police detective (Park Hae-il) investigates a potential suicide, he becomes obsessed with the surviving wife (Tang Wei) who his cop partner (Go Kyung-Pyo) feels sure is the dead man's killer. Then the whole thing repeats — a new squad sidekick (Kim Shin-young)— again in another city. That's when Decision to Leave really soars. Complications become complexities; Park's decision to create simultaneities — allowing the past and present to coexist in a frame — grows even more poetic as history repeats itself in the linear storyline. And isn't the past, inherently, always something of a blur? Aren't we always haunted by the choices we make?

These are classic Park questions. And aside from the atypically restrained violence (a turtle bite may be as gruesome as it gets), this is a quintessential Park movie, right down to the score by Jo Yeong-wook (a composer who's been collaborating with Park fairly consistently since 2000's Joint Security Area). Everything is so carefully constructed that you have to admire the craftsmanship, even if you occasionaly can predict where it's going. A Greek tragedy doesn't depend on being surprised by every twist and turn or the ending. Nor does this Korean one.

The Handmaiden: Woman Is the Future of Man

Lady Vengeance marked a turning point in Park Chan-wook's career, being as it was, his first feature film to have a female protagonist. He'd had important female characters before: the radical girlfriend in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the unfortunate daughter in Oldboy, even the special investigator in Joint Security Area. Yet, as you can see, these women were largely defined by their relationships to men. Once Park put a woman front and center, however, his female characters got a hell of a lot more interesting. The insane young woman in I'm a Cyborg, But that's Okay and his variation of Therese Raquin for his vampire flick Thirst are much more complicated than the various women who came before. I guess, Park simply realized that he couldn't get Song Kang-ho for every movie he was making.

Which isn't to say that Park has moved beyond the male gaze with his latest. To the contrary, The Handmaiden seems to revel in it. The more powerful his on-screen women become, the more sexual they become as well. This particular movie takes that idea to its utmost extreme. The love triangle that forms between an orphan-heiress (Kim Min-hee), the titular handmaiden (Kim Tae-ri), and a fraudulent Count (Ha Jung-woo) would in theory show three different pairings but when it comes to the kissing, stroking, fingering, nipple licking, felatio, scissoring, and the insertion of ringing balls, most of that's done by the two women to each other. Intercourse between a man and a woman is more likely to be threatened (or read via old smutty books) than actualized. But this it too titilating to be a feminist manifesto. Sometimes the sex is shown from a humorous vantage point (the crotch POV); other times, the nudity is highly theatrical (in profile atop a table). Park's often been criticized for the violence in his movies (and there's definitely some shockers here) but you've got to give him credit: He also knows how to compose a picture — admittedly with some serious help from Chung Chung-hoon, the brilliant cinematographer who'd worked with him on six other films before this one.

Judgement: The Mortician of Oz

People who think they don't like Park Chan-wook, and write off the world class director as an auteur of arty torture porn, would be wise to take a look at some of his less bloody shorts, which often scale back on the violence without downplaying the gallows' humor that has become Park's thumbprint. With the early-career short "Judgement" (sp) for example -- which precedes not only his revered/reviled vengeance trilogy but also J.S.A.: Joint Security Area -- Park already exhibits a fully realized, comically macabre sensibility, a one-of-a-kind grotesque sense of humor that has gone on to earn him devoted fans -- me among them.

The action in "Judgement" takes place in a morgue. But if you assume Park is about to settle for "morbid absurdities" in this 26-minute pic, think again. The impromptu inquest that takes place in "Judgement" (which has its fair share of grim slapstick and hairpin plot twists) is occurring amid an end-of-days scenario of horrific proportions. While a mourning couple (Ko In-bae and Kwon Nam-hee) and an alcoholic diener (Gi Ju-bong) argue over the true identity of a corpse -- and the rightful claims to some substantial insurance money -- within the morgue, the world outside is being ravaged by earthquakes, tornadoes and tidal waves. The arrival of a young woman may leave you further doubting the story of some of the players here but in "Judgement," the question isn't who is lying but why anybody would be telling the truth in the first place... even a seemingly disinterested person like the TV correspondent (Choi Hak-rak).

Like all Park films, even other shorts such as his unforgettably inventive mini-documentary "If You Were Me" and his improbably slick iPhone creation "Night Fishing," "Judgement" is exquisitely shot. Park makes pictures AND tells stories, mostly this time around in cinematographer Pak Hyun-chul's somewhat newsreel-like, somewhat surveillance-camera-footage black-and-white before changing momentously to an unflattering color stock that arrives with all the shock and awe of the yellow brick road. The homage to The Wizard of Oz arrives with a catch: No one is going home this time around.

Stoker: Park Chan-wook Comes to America

So the actors aren't speaking Korean. So what? Stoker is nevertheless a Korean movie because it's still very much a Park Chan-wook movie. A vexatious coming-of-age tale shaped by sociopathic genetics, Stoker -- like so many Park flicks before it -- is a deviously crafted thriller with Park misleading you then revealing clues that make you retrace your steps only to you realize that you were never misinformed, just uninformed. Here are the players this time around: Evelyn, a recent widow (Nicole Kidman) who always felt like the odd man out with her now-dead husband and ice-cold daughter; India, said offspring (Mia Wasikowska) who has her own outsider status at high school where she gets straight A's but has no friends; Uncle Charlie (a really good Matthew Goode), a mystery man who shows up from out of nowhere then stirs up some heat with mother and daughter. Let the intergenerational rivalry begin.

Like Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer earlier this year, Park makes some fascinating casting choices for his Hollywood debut. Aside from the aforementioned trio, he's brought on board Jacki Weaver (a two-time Oscar nominee who remains someone that no one's heard of), Dermot Mulroney (the former heartthrob who's now pudgy and gray), and perhaps most delightfully, Harmony Korinne (the indie screenwriter behind Kids, Gummo and Ken Park). Though Korinne's time on screen is fleeting, Park's nod to this fellow auteur is kind of perfect. Park and Korinne are both fearless directors who've got aesthetics unlike anyone else. I also was pleased that Park stuck with his longtime cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon which ensures that Stoker always looks like a Park film as much as it feels like one or sounds like one, even in English.

Given how enthralling Stoker is, I suspect the reason it didn't do better at the box office stateside is that the movie touches on so many taboos -- incest, child-killing, teenage sexuality -- with a disturbingly sweaty hand. Park never condemn atrocities. He bears witness, glosses them up a bit, then stands back leaving you to feel the horror. Alone. Stoker's unsettling for sure.

Snowpiercer: Bong Joon-ho Does Scifi a la Park Chan-wook

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are many examples of spiritual journeys that take their protagonists through a series of bizarre rooms before delivering them to an inner chamber housing a great if hidden truth. For Bong Joon-ho, the rooms in Snowpiercer may be train cars but the quest remains the same: The hero -- or in this case, the cannibalistic antihero (Chris Evans) -- must navigate a succession of rooms, each with its unique challenges, each with its own queer millieu, before arriving at the font of wisdom. The engine room, as it were. Along the way, he'll pass through a well-guarded water room with a lady tyrant clownishly played by a buck-toothed Tilda Swinton, a Willy Wonka-esque school room overseen by a blindingly sunny, pregnant fascist (Alison Pill), a kitchen where cockroaches are turned into gelatinous bricks of protein, a greenhouse, a steam room, a nightclub, and so on. The final chamber -- the engine room -- is ironically the domain of a child-kidnapping God-like tyrant (Ed Harris). Shades of The Truman Show?

What's unusual is that once Ed Harris' character unveils the TRUTH, the epiphany occurs not for Curtis but for Yona (Ko Ah-sung), a seer who hasn't heard it and who, as apprentice to the train's master locksmith Min-Soo (Song Kang-ho), has spent much of the time in a drug-addled haze. Are we hallucinating this scifi pic's parade of celebs along with her, for there's also John Hurt as a steampunk Yoda, Jamie Bell as a second banana in the people's army and a sleepy-eyed Octavia Spencer as a mom out to get her kid back. You might also cite Park Chan-wook as a co-star. While he doesn't appear on screen, his imprint is apparent as producer: Snowpiercer is packed with the video-game violence that has caused some critics to label Park as a purveyor of gore porn. I've never felt that way but I do feel the recurring blood-splattering here proved a bit much. Bong usually finds his shocks in psychology.

The Anarchists: The Nicest Terrorists You'll Ever Meet

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it's more than a little weird to watch Yu Yong-sik's The Anarchists (a.k.a. Anakiseuteu Anarchists) because this historical bromance about Korean terrorists who assassinate Japanese oppressors in 1920s Shanghai is so little about politics and violence and so much about brotherhood and youthful aimlessness. With a screenplay by none less than Park Chan-wook, The Anarchists isn't shy about slaughter. Men are stabbed, shot repeatedly, slit in the throat... Even women get tortured. But most of the time, this movie's all about male bonding, how young revolutionary Sang-gul (Kim In-kwon), once rescued from the gallows, comes to love and respect his mentors in the revolution. They're a likable bunch: a nihilistic opium addict named Seregay (Jang Dong-gun), a hotheaded prankster named Dol-suk (Lee Beom-su), a bespectacled didact named Myung-Gon (Kim Sang-jung) and a wannabe radical named Geun (Jeong Jun-ho) who never really seems to have his heart in the cause even as he's willing to sacrifice his life to it. Though the characters never break into a chorus of "Friendship / Friendship / Just a perfect blendship," you do get the feeling that they're humming it when the camera pans away.

Platonic loyalty is hardly unique to Park's canon. Think of the absurdly devoted women in Lady Vengeance or the extreme devotion among the soldiers in J.S.A.: Joint Security Area. But the camaraderie shared by characters written by Park but directed by others always feels more palsy-walsy than sealed in blood. In both Yu's The Anarchists and Lee Mu-yeong's The Humanist, the extremism that defines unconditional love is tempered, leaving something more like chumminess in its place. Admittedly, few directors can match Park's ability to glamorize violence without losing its grotesqueness. De Palma and Scorsese immediately come to mind. And Yu, admittedly has one scene that comes close: A slow-mo bit in which Seregay gets a bullet hole in the head then falls backwards, his descent captured at various camera angles heightening the surreality of the cigarette still smoking between his now-dead lips. But that's an isolated moment. Most bloody encounters in The Anarchists are a little too tamely respectful of the audience to actually achieve something that would earn the audience's wildly undying respect.

Lady Vengeance: And the Lord Sent Down an Angel of Justice

I've often said that Oldboy, that perverted whodunit, is my favorite Park Chan-wook film, and sometimes my favorite Korean film period, but after re-watching Lady Vengeance, I'm not so sure. Park's final entry in his vengeance trilogy — the first being Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; the second, Oldboy — is definitely a masterpiece in its own right, too. A mystery within a mystery within a mystery, Lady Vengeance begins as a revenge fantasy of which we know neither the crime nor the perpetrator, segues into a well-orchestrated murder plotted out at a women's prison where grrl-power informs a secret society, then returns to its original crime only to reflect it in a fractured mirror. One child's death unveils many; one woman's pursuit of retribution from a serial killer is set aside for a form of mob justice.

At the center of it all is Geum-ja (Lee Yeoung-ae), a conniving ex-convict wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a little boy; a guilt-ridden woman willing to chop off her finger as penance for the crime she abetted; a sorrowful mom out to reunite with daughter Jenny (Kwon Yea-young) who she gave up for adoption to Australians long ago; and a guilt-free Cougar having an affair with the inexperienced teenager (Kim Shi-hoo) who works with her at the local bakery. If that sounds like a lot for one character, one actor, don't worry, Lee is totally up to the task of playing one of the more complex characters in Park's ouevre with a surprisingly light touch.

By turns haunted, crafty, bewildered, tender, and enraged, Lee underplays what another actress would overact in the hopes of taking home an acting trophy. There's no prolonged scream of rage or cry of horror from Lee. Instead, she conveys everything with a cool detachment. There's a great scene late in the movie, right after the central revenge has finally come to fruition, where the camera catches Lee smiling in a way that literally bridges grief and happiness. Unlike most performers who'd segue from laughter to tears as two kindred extremes, Lee rides the middle ground, with a quivering smile that hovers between sadness and joy for so long that you'll start thinking Mona Lisa's smile isn't so complicated. Park's touch is similarly light and ambivalent. Keeping the violence largely off camera, Lady Vengeance ends up extreme in one sense only: extremely delightful.

JSA: Joint Security Area: Blood on the Border

When I first saw JSA: Joint Security Area a few years ago, it left me restless and unimpressed. Having seen Park Chan-wook's flashy vengeance trilogy, JSA struck me as too slow, a novice work at best. On second viewing, I feel a bit contrite about that assessment. Today, I'd say JSA is a pretty great movie. Who care that it doesn't have the adrenaline thrills of Lady Vengeance or Oldboy? It delivers just as suspenseful a story, albeit one grounded in political realities instead of quirky fantasy. As a result, JSA proves an engrossing meditation on the same extreme violence that Park is always obsessing about in his more outlandish flicks. His oddly credible story (he co-wrote the screenplay) concerns the unlikely friendship that develops between four Korean border guards -- two from the South (Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-Woo) and two from the North (Song Kang-ho and Shin Ha-kyun) -- as they defy nationalized enmity. Since the movie is constructed as a flashback, you know their rebellious brotherhood is ultimately doomed. Like us, a Swiss military investigator (Lee Geum-ja in a truly fab Louise Brooks haircut) is determined to figure out what led to the final bloodshed that will leave all but one dead. Like her, we're moved by an outcome that feels tragically inevitable.

Thirst: The Blood of Jesus Isn't Supposed to Get You Drunk

Thirst is a long movie. Yet what's wrong with long as long as long's not painful? And director Park Chan-wook is never painful. At least, not painfully boring. Park at his worst is a shocking curio, and an intelligent one at that. What is painful about Park (for the queasy) is his synthesis of gore and lore. But if the sight of a blister-covered, self-martyring priest-vampire (Song Kang-ho) vomiting blood through his recorder strikes you as horrifying and oddly hilarious, Thirst is your kind of picture. Actually, Thirst may be Park's funniest movie so far. One extended sequence focuses on how a deliriously cheerful drowning victim (Shin Ha-kyun) haunts the priest-vampire and his psychopathic soul mate (Kim Ok-bin); another has a paralyzed stroke-victim mother (Kim Hae-sook) revealing -- with eye blinks and finger taps -- that this same bloodthirsty duo has killed her son. Has anyone else shown a compassionate vampire feast on his drink of choice by using the feeding tube of a fat comatose patient as if it were a straw? Not that all the shocks are Grand Guignol grotesqueness. Thirst also contains some seriously hot sex scenes that equate Dracula's charms with masochism. Like the song says, you know it hurts so good.

Oldboy: Revenge Is Sweet, Repeatedly

I'd always been afraid to watch Oldboy a second time because I loved it so much the first. This movie, along with Save the Green Planet, is why I'm the longstanding fan of Korean film that I am. I didn't want to mess with that memory. I didn't want to rob Oldboy of its stature. In a nutshell, I was secretly worried that knowing the "shocking ending" beforehand would diminish the pleasures ahead. Would it end up feeling like a gimmick flick? Not to fear. Park Chan-wook's revenge masterpiece works equally well when you're clued in to the horrific plot twists. It's still creepy, lyrical, and deranged but now it's also deterministic. That main guy is doomed! Choi Min-sik gives what's likely the performance of his career as a man who, imprisoned 15 years for crimes unknown, is driven crazy by his need to discover why he was captured and confined. He's more than ably supported by Kang Hye-jeong as a blameless femme fatale and Yu Ji-tae as his pretty boy nemesis. The whole spiral downward is stunningly shot, paced, and performed. And does anyone not like perfection simply because they know where it's going? Not me. If an ending's any good, it's good whether you know it's coming or not. The spoiler is a term reserved for second-rate films.

I'm a Cyborg But That's Okay: A Doorway to the Psych Ward's Padded Cell

For years, critics censured Park Chan-wook for glamorizing violence in his landmark trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance). And while you'll encounter the same high-gloss gunfire in I'm a Cyborg But That's Okay too, Park slyly sidesteps the issue this time by placing every gloriously shot, bloody massacre inside one crazy character's trippy head. She's a mental patient (Lim Su-jeong in a fright wig) who think she's bionic so her little fingers turn into mini-machine-guns whenever she gets too lightheaded from malnourishment and feels compelled to act out a fantasy. Now the question arises: Is an artful staging of a mass murder more or less offensive when it makes you wish it had happened? By the closing credits, I was convinced that this movie would have been better if the delusional damsel was really an android assassin capable of mowing down doctors and orderlies, and that likewise, her fellow inmate (played by the pop star Rain) would be more interesting if he did indeed have the ability to steal people's personality traits or shrink to the size of a dot. Because their whimsical romance never makes that glorious leap to scifi, the electroshocking moments leave us with a clean conscience: We haven't seen anything that will corrupt us.

The Humanist: Thick as Thieves, the Thickheaded Ones

The line between tragedy and comedy is a thin one but for some reason it's much easier to cross in a single direction. There are plenty of "serious" movies awful enough to be funny. The horror genre abounds with them. But there aren't many comedies so unfunny, they're downright serious. Which brings us to The Humanist, a comedy-thriller hybrid that broadly indicates "kooky" without ever being so. The problem is probably directorial since the script was co-written by auteur Park Chan-wook. Park never goes for the laugh even when it's indicated. In his hands, lives and stories spin crazily out of control but they feel surreal, not silly; with Park, every crazy step between the accidental killing of a cop and the internal death threats among three friends would've been guided by a lushly filmed fatal determinism. And the extreme violence, especially the flashbacks with kids brutally smashing each others' heads with rocks, would have been gorgeously horrific. Here, in Lee Mu-yeong's hands, the grownup brat (Ahn Jae-mo), the oaf (Park Sang-myeon), and the nutjob (Kang Seong-jin) seem forced to amputate a beggar (Kim Myoeng-su) and rape a nun (Myeong Sun-mi) without real cause. Withhold applause.

Three... Extremes: A Cut Above

It recently dawned on me that Korea is the Ireland of Asia. As major influences go, it's got China and Japan to Ireland's U.S. and England. Plus, it's got a similar North-South, politically polarized split with the Southern part being the more celebratory half. (Are Protestants the Communists of Europe?) It wasn't politics that triggered this realization however. It was art. For just as the Emerald Isle, despite its diminutive size, smaller population, weaker role in the world, troubled history, etc., can go head-to-head with either America or Britain in terms of literature (Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Swift), Korea can do the same with its big brothers in terms of film. Take a look at the movie Three... Extremes, a trilogy of horror flicks from Hong Kong ("Dumplings"), Korea ("Cut"), and Japan ("Box"). This triptych could easily serve as an argument for Korean moviemaking supremacy. Admittedly, Fruit Chan and Takashi Mike aren't their respective countries Wong Kar-wai or Kurosawa (whereas Park Chan-wook is his country's Park Chan-wook). But even so, when it comes to working within the horror genre, neither Hong Kong nor Tokyo comes close to Seoul's succubus of a film. In comparison to Park's Shavian tale of a film-extra hell-bent on leveling the playing field for heaven, Chan's Swiftian parable about a woman willing to eat fetuses to regain youth and Mike's not-too-wild dream of a Siamese twin look plain silly. Throw in a fantastic performance from Lim Won-hie as the crazy who can dance as well as he wields an axe, and you've got the makings of thriller that's not only visually stunning but highly entertaining as well.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance: Prime Park

Let's face it. Park Chan-wook rocks. I just saw Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first part of his visually lush vengeance trilogy, and that man has such a gorgeously deranged understanding of human psychology. He's definitely got a thing for the anti-hero that leaves you wondering who to root for. The deaf-dumb child-killer who's just trying to get a kidney for his dying sister? or the cold-hearted businessman who finds his world turned upside down by a kidnapping? The narrative tying these two guys together is outlandish even as it slips inside reality. It's just this side of the possible. There could be a world where people got gypped doing black market organ donations; where grief-stricken artists buried their siblings under a pile of thoughtfully arranged river stones; where a makeshift band of terrorists exacted revenge on behalf of their ludicrous pamphleteer. What I love about Chan-wook's films is how these narrative twists are surprising and inevitable. Life can be like that, the slippery slope. You look up, everything is rushing by in a flash of bruised beauty. The world is a mercilessly violent place.