Murder on his mind

Park Chan-wook's brutal films put Korean cinema on the map. His latest is a blistering satire about a man driven to the edge

- By Steve Rose COVER PORTRAIT David Levene

THE KOREAN WAVE is being feted around the world right now but Park Chanwook is not feeling too celebratory.

From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscarwinning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park's latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat.

It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility with no KPop Demon Hunters to save the day.

"I did not mean for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025," says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-yearold. "It's more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism." No Other Choice's setting is the comically mundane but almost literally cut-throat world of paper manufacturing, where a freshly fired executive hatches a deranged scheme to murder his rivals for a new position, of which he does a pretty bad job. But it could just as well be about the entertainment industry, which is more precarious than it looks, Park suggests: "Even though Korean films and shows are so globally trendy, Korean audiences have not been returning to the theatre after the pandemic, and there's also talk around how the TV industry is being threatened. And this decline happened immediately after the success of Squid Game and Parasite. I think that gap in itself is very ironic."