THRILLER; 2hr 19min (Korean with subtitles)
STARRING: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin
Desperate times: Lee
The opening scene of Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of The Ax, Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror novel, is bathed in golden light as a family of four sits down to eat. Their domestic bliss is so ideally realised you know it’s headed straight to hell.
It lands there at a dismaying speed when paper company executive Man-su (Lee) is fired from his job by new American owners after 25 years of faithful service. Thirteen punishing months later, with no management prospects in sight and debts piling up, Man-su’s wife, Mi-ri (Son), takes control, farming out their two dogs to her parents, putting the family home on the market, taking a job as a dental hygienist and cancelling Netflix, which fails to impress the couple’s teenage son (Woo Seung Kim; So Yul Choi is their cello-prodigy young daughter).
Driven to an unhinged desperation that involves contemplating the murder of a rival with a pot plant, Man-su then resorts to staging a hiring ad for a paper company that doesn’t exist in order to flush out any competition. When two of the applicants’ CVs outshine his own, he promptly decides to kill them.
Woeful though this crack-up sounds, in the deranged spirit of director Costa-Gravas’s 2005 film of Westlake’s tall tale, Park takes a quasi-jaunty tone with Man-su’s homicidal slide. His spying and conniving are so over the top it’s impossible to take them seriously, even when they do turn deadly. If there is a moral to this absurdist dig at dehumanising corporate culture, it can only be morals are expendable. As Man-su would ultimately agree, when your choice is to either dispose of your opponents or to roll over and play dead, the most practical option is to team up with machines. Human beings, after all, are hard wired for betrayal.
