Welcome to Episode #253 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up with older movies from some of this year’s best directors, starting with Park Chan-wook’s infamous gross-out revenge thriller Oldboy(2003).
“No other choice,” the new, American corporate overlords of Solar Paper say to Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when he attempts to confront them about their mass lay-offs at the company where he has worked for decades. “No other choice,” Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) says to his wife when she asks why he can’t get a job in another industry; “Paper has fed me for 25 years, honey. It’s how I’m meant to be.” “No other choice,” say Man Su’s interviewers at Moon Paper as they describe their company’s movement to more automation and the removal of all human labor from their process. “No other choice,” Man Su murmurs to himself over and over again, taking the mantra-repeating practice taught in his lay-off exit group counseling session and applying it not to positive affirmations but to reassurances that his increasingly violent actions are justifiable. It’s the refrain of the past as it overshadows the present, a soundbite of self-flagellation about the impossibility of changing the future while actively creating that future in the same moment.
If you’ve seen the trailers for No Other Choice, then you probably think you know what the film will be about, and to an extent, you’re going to get some of what you’re expecting. That’s the Park Chan-Wook special! I’ve still never seen Oldboy, the film he’s probably best known for, but I have seen (and loved) The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance, Decision to Leave, and Stoker, and No Other Choice can now be added to that list of Park’s great achievements. If you’ve seen any of those films, you’ll also likely remember that they all feature a major upheaval right around the middle of the runtime to the expectations regarding all the ways that the plot could branch and pivot, based on what you’ve become accustomed to from other films in the same genre. No Other Choice presents itself as a film about a man who loses his job and, desperate to cling to the status and lifestyle that his former position offered, turns to murderous ends to eliminate his competitors for a position with a paper company that has “cracked the Japanese market.” That’s true, but in classic Park style, the director manages to take unexpected but plausible turns, with that mid-film sharp turn taking things in entirely unexpected directions.
In narratives of this type, the protagonist’s family is often left on the margins of the story, treated as merely branches upon which some extensions of the male lead’s drama can hang. Most often, the wife leaves, taking the kids with her, if there are any. Sometimes, she leaves with blackmail material so that her husband must keep his distance. Other films that have a superficially happy ending, as this one does, see the family shunted to the side until the final moments reunite them before the credits roll. Man Su, his wife, stepson, and daughter are all once again ensconced in their home again at the end of the film, but the victory feels temporary. For one, Man Su’s wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) doesn’t know the width and breadth of her husband’s activities, but she knows enough to know that he’s killed, and she not only keeps this secret, but also lies to her son about her husband’s nocturnal adventures to cover for him, so as to prevent him from fearing Man Su. For the rest of her life (or at least the rest of her marriage), she will be forced to maintain a facade of normalcy while compartmentalizing her deception of her son and of her husband, from whom she keeps the knowledge that she had seen one of the bodies he buried. Miri and Man Su have also kept the fact that their boy is not his son, acknowledging between themselves that they promised to tell him once he was old enough to shave, but they decide to maintain that lie as well. For Man Su, it’s also clear to the audience that although he may have wormed his way back into the world of paper manufacturing, this position is even less solid than the one he had before, and it’s likely only a matter of time before he’s laid off again, and then this whole violent cycle may begin anew.
If I had to treat this review like a middle school book report and identify its theme, I would highlight that this film is about the fickle nature of independence. Man Su and Miri’s daughter is a nonverbal cello prodigy who refuses to play for the family, and even when the characters forego a lot of their costlier possessions—selling both of the family’s luxury cars and consolidating to a singular utilitarian sedan, giving their beloved dogs to Miri’s parents to care for, cancelling their tennis lessons and Netflix subscriptions, and even slowly selling off their furniture and electronics—the one thing that they ensure continues to be paid for are her cello lessons. When she reaches a point when her tutor is no longer able to teach her anything and refers the family to a music professor, the parents replay a conversation that they had earlier in which they talked about how the most important thing that they could do for their daughter would be to ensure that she is able to be independent, which they only see being possible if she becomes a musician. Their son also attempts to attain his own minor financial independence, in a poorly thought out cell phone reselling scheme that almost ends in tragedy, but offers Man Su the opportunity to show off his new, tough attitude in front of Miri when facing off against the owner of the shop, whose son is their son’s best friend and co-conspirator.
Independence is good for one but not the other, and it’s unclear where Miri lies in all of this. Strangely, almost all of the wives of the four men in competition with one another are unemployed women of leisure; Miri’s life consists of ferrying her children about between their academic and extracurricular activities between tennis bouts, Beom-mo’s wife is an actress who can’t seem to get a part and has so much free time she still manages to carry on an affair in a house with a laid-off husband, second victim Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won)’s wife is unmentioned, and his final victim Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) is recently divorced and seems to still be supporting his ex. All of them are literally dependent, and what independence they do achieve undermines their respective husbands’ masculinity, through adultery, the perception of infidelity, or something completely different. Man Su’s suspicions about his wife are unfounded, with his overall hypocrisy highlighted by the fact that what he’s done is much, much worse than being unfaithful. Every man here tells himself that he has no other choice, and they’re all wrong, to their respective downfalls.
This is a beautifully shot film, with fantastic and imaginative use of color. That’s never been something that Park has been afraid of, but it makes this combination of his uniquely unforgiving style and a (new to me) almost slapstick sense of comedy synthesize into something unique, and the almost Technicolor landscape makes it all the more special. The film is also full of seeming mundanities that might be metaphors for us to puzzle out over multiple viewings. A great deal is made out of Man Su’s tooth pain, as he has a molar that’s rotting away but he can’t do anything about it, until he finally pries the thing out in a primal rage in the film’s final half hour. There’s also time spent on the backstory of the house, that it was the house he grew up in and it stood on the edge of his father’s pig farm, but the farm went bust when a couple hundred pigs had to be put down due to a disease and were buried in a mass grave that still exists under part of the property. It’s grim stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading other critics’ analyses and interpretations in the coming months just as much as I’m looking forward to a rewatch.
Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4. I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays. On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits. On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!). What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases. Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal. Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages& Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs. And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms. Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone. By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.
Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal. A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary. That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave. My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc. However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater. I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist. So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer. Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes. Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.
As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes. Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer. Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time. Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc. Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs. Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio. Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it). He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe. The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going. After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated. I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory. It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty. In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week. Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks. I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series. The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation,Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater. It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar. It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.
There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs. I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas. By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures. What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes. Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.
That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions. In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows. A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line. It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work. This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale. It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence. Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.
Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre. You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden. It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though. There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre. Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic. It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps. It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.
Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills. More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear. Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground. I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Korean provocateur Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker (2013) — a high-style Gothic melodrama modeled after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.
00:00 Welcome
03:30 The City of Lost Children (1995) 06:35 The X-Files (1998) 10:40 The Unholy (2021) 13:24 A Perfect Enemy (2021) 14:34 Stowaway (2021) 16:12 The Toll (2021) 19:27 Saint Maud (2021) 21:30 Promising Young Woman (2020) 27:56 Psycho Goreman (2021) 37:17 Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) 41:48 Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) 42:33 Pig (2021) 47:15 Hackers (1995)
I’m typically not a huge fan of twisty shenanigans in my movie plots, but director Park Chan-wook’s latest is a testament to the virtues of The Major Plot Twist as a storytelling device. The Handmaiden is a deliberately twisty crime story in which the audience is continually conned into believing half-truths depending on the minute-to-minute revelations of its various narrators, anxiously awaiting the next rug pull to knock us on our ass. As a lesbian erotic thriller with meticulous dedication to craft & a Tarantino-esque celebration of crime & revenge narratives, the film plays like an unholy combination of the flashier aspects of Bound & The Duke of Burgundy, if you could believe such a thing was possible. It’s a gleefully tawdry art piece that takes great delight in its own narrative cleverness, but also constructs a strong enough visual foundation for its flashy storytelling style to shine instead of annoy. If The Handmaiden were a little uglier or if its bigger reveals were held until its final moments, its tonal balancing act might have crumbled disastrously. As is, it’s too fun & too beautiful to resist.
A petty criminal brings in an even pettier cohort for a conspiracy plot to gaslight a young heiress & rob her of her dowry once she’s declared insane. The young, naïve forger finds it increasingly difficult to live a lie as the heiress’s dutiful handmaiden as she finds herself falling unexpectedly in love with her would-be victim. The love is quickly revealed to be mutual and the film deals in largely the same unspoken, but physically expressed homosexual desire as Carol . . . until it culminates in an explicit, laugh-heavy sex scene (or three). Once their mutual desire is solidified & consummated the question is how much further the handmaiden is willing to deceive & exploit her lady. That is, until Park starts to have fun in deceiving & exploiting his own audience. There’s a near-endless sea of complex relationships, past abuses, planned double-crossings, and unthinkable depths of greed that Park plays close to the chest until he can use them to prank & subvert audience expectation. It isn’t a storytelling style I usually care for, considering how much attention it calls to its own cleverness, but The Handmaiden is so lovingly constructed & visually detailed that my personal apprehension with its tone means nothing. It also helps that the film often plays like a comedy, one where the humor lands consistently & sometimes even tenderly.
The Handmaiden is above all else a film about forgery. Its characters forge expensive books & jewelry, along with entire identities. The central conman forges a life where he can pose as nobility despite his empty bank account & lowly beginnings. The lady’s uncle/Master forges himself a new national identity, forsaking his Korean heritage for a false air of Japanese superiority, complete with a vast collection of his adopted country’s erotica & a particular obsession with the infamous octopus sex print The Tale of the Fisherman’s Wife. Most importantly, though, the film tackles the idea of forged desire. It pits the real-life sexual attraction between the lady & her handmaiden against the forgeries of the predatory masculine seduction forced by the conman & the hideously cruel uncle, making almost a divine object out of the genuine thing. In his own way, Park himself also deals in a kind of forgery – intentionally selling the audience a fake version of his own story before slowly revealing the genuine version of the real thing. He was smart to marry that storytelling deceit with the consistent theme of deceit in the film’s content; it works both as an acknowledgement & as a mission statement.
A lot of the fun of The Handmaiden is in trying to get a firm hand on the film’s tone. Depending on what moment you’re watching, it can play as a myriad of different genres: a farce, a revenge thriller, a ghost story, intense erotica, literal gallows humor, etc. Park Chan-wook is playful & adventurous in the way he navigates these moods, but he anchors the film to a solid foundation of highly specific, meticulously crafted imagery. A cherry blossom tree, an octopus, a coiled rope, an ink-stained tongue; The Handmaiden is first & foremost an achievement in intense costume & sent design, which allows for plenty of room in its narrative sprawl for twist-heavy shenanigans. I don’t think it’s quite the exquisite art piece of the similarly twisty & playfully erotic The Duke of Burgundy, but the film also gives no implication that it’s aiming for that work’s quiet emotional impact. It mostly aims to have fun with its narrative & its audience and by that measurement it’s a major success.
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