Monthly Archives: February 2026

No Other Choice     Park Chan Wook (Kor; 2025) Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin

viewed 27 Jan 2026 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £13.49

it all ends happily ever after

The most interesting sequences in Park’s ‘No Other Choice’ bookend his movie.  The establishment of Man Su and his family in their suburban paradise ending with Man Su’s exclamation: “I got it all!”; and the final shots of the the complete automation of the paper industry from the felling of trees through to the manufacturing process. The film in effect takes two hours and ten minutes to link them with the tale of ‘an overcoming.’   

This is a story of suburban folk, their trial and tribulations in an age of angst.

Thinking about another Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the strength of his early work lay in its interpenetration of contemporary Korea by the folk memories of an earlier archaic period dominated by ghosts and spirits.  ‘No Other Choice’ finds Korea in clear water, the past has completely vanished from the rear view mirror. The country is in full embrace of the American way of life: BBQ land.  No spooks.  But in fact the eventual form taken by Park’s film does invoke ideas from another realm.    

Man Su has wife kids with music lessons, dogs, lifestyle, works for a paper company that enables him to keep up the life style and the mortgage payments to the bank.  It all depends on the job.  But in a sequence that is parody of the process of corporate downsizing, we see Man Su given the order of the boot and then becoming the object of compensatory therapeutic counselling provided by the company to help him ‘move on’ with his life and get another job.  At which point we come to the core of the movie: his embrace of ‘overcoming’, a favourite Hollywood motif in which individuals take on the world which has put them down and win out; daring to dream daring to realise the dream: they ‘overcome.’  Life as an obstacle course.  A fairy tale.

Man Su’s situation is that like the protagonist is a fairy tale he needs to find a way out of his dilemma.  There is: no other choice. 

As automation (and we await the tranche of films dealing with those poor souls ditched for Al) takes over the paper making business, work is thin on the ground.  But the redundant Man Su realises he needs work in this, the one business he knows.  His wife’s part time work as a dental hygienist and his job stacking shelves will not make the money needed to keep dogs in chow or stop the re-po guys from taking his house back.  Man Su has some serious stuff to ‘overcome’. He lights on the idea of a little serial killing.  The idea is to kill off the competitors vying with him for the one and only good job that’s has been advertised in the paper making trade.

Park’s movie is intended as a satirical response to the ruthless nature of corporate capitalism, in particular in economies undergoing rapid change.  Exemplifying how the cut throat redundancy practices of firms have a contaminatory effect on individuals, causing them in turn to become ruthless in pursuit of their own interests, whatever the cost to others. 

But it’s a satire that’s wrapped up in the tissue paper of the trials and tribulations of the petit bourgeois life style.  As Man Su sets about his killing spree the film digresses, developing subplots involving both his family life and the life of one of his victims.  These are effectively little stories centering about the usual stuff consuming the emotional energy of the suburbs: marital infidelity and anti social children.  These little digressions all end as anti-climaxes but, and here’s the but, everything always turns out well.

As Park’s film develops it becomes apparent that it changes key.  The script that begins as a satire transforms into a fairy tale.  As Man Su embarks upon the first of the three traditional tests set the hero in a typical story by the brothers Grimm, the satire dissolves out of the scenario, replaced by Man Su embarking on three mythic tasks. As in fairyland what’s critical is that the accomplishment of each of these tasks advances the prospects of the hero. There are no adverse consequences.  Ma Su murders and everything continues as normal; the killings are simply tests of his worthiness to reclaim his estate.  In fairy tale terms   they take place in a parallel psychic space; in dramatic terms they have an anticlimactic quality.

 Once Man Su has completed his three tasks he can reclaim his kingdom. 

As in a fairy tale it all ends happily ever after.  Man Su gets the job he wants with the paper company.  He manages a production process that is totally automated.  He is the only human employed on new era shop floor.  No ghosts or spirits haunt either the Company or Man Su.  The dogs return; the mortgage payments are made, Man Su’s little girl, a musical genius, plays cello for them for the first time.  Disney! Cry your eyes out.

Park’s ‘No Other Choice’  starting out as a satire transforms into a Disney cartoon.  And the more it conforms to the norms of Disney the more the satiric elements of the film diminish.  But the cost of becoming a Hollywood fairy tale is that that as the satirical intent in the movie is lost, the film becomes increasingly predicable in its play out. ‘No Other Choice’ as a satire had potential to sparkle; as a fairy tale it’s overlong dull and lacking sparkle.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

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The Duke of Burgundy  Peter Strickland (UK;  2014)   Sidse Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn        

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 29 Jan 2026; Ticket: £7.00

Insecti=cide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead

My feeling after viewing Strickland’s ‘Duke of Burgundy’ was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director seduced by his own amour propre. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director, feels like a love note to himself, an exercise in a particular sort of contemporary narcissism.

The title is taken from the name of a type of highly patterned butterfly of which we see many in the course of the film, mostly dead, like the film itself.

The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent movie lacking tensions and ideas that reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie manipulates form and structure to engender the illusion that his films have some sort of  substance. 

In ‘Katalin Varga’ Strickland made extensive use of landscape to extend out the emotional mood of his revenge narrative; in ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ he made similar use of his sound track to feed and extend the layered narrative threads.  In both these movies the form and structure of the material fed directly into the film’s themes and subject matter: revenge in the case of ‘Katalin’ and in ‘Berberian’ the idea of evil as a pervasive overflowing overwhelming psychic force.   

Intercut visual imagery and sound fx as filmic devices can work as signifiers pointing to something in the nature of the film. The use of landscape or skyscape shots cut into the flow of a drama implies that the audience should make some sort of cognitive or emotional link (or perhaps make an absurdist non-link) implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of  imagery.  Likewise the use of suggestive emotive or violent sound superimposed on images out of the visual context is a signifier or a manipulator that radically changes the viewers’ state of mind and understanding of what they are seeing on screen. 

 ‘Katalin Varga’ justifies its cut-aways to scenic imagery by suggesting the linking of the idea of revenge with the forces of nature; ‘Berberian Sound Studio’s’ demonic sound fx work effectively for the first half of the scenario before collapsing in on themselves, overused and unable to sustain the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds.  In ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ there’s a lack of underlying idea.  Strickland’s filmic devices register as tricks, spurious effects used to fill out his soft porn scenario,  to leaven footage  that is otherwise drearily monotonous.  For all the SM baggage the seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, encasement, bondage and SM persiflage eventally come across as rather silly but not particularly interesting.  

‘The Duke of Burgindy’ locks into the mistress/servant game that  Cynthia and Evelyn are playing (a game that sometimes breaks down).  The relationship is characterised  by long mannered invariant looks that pass between the two players and Strickland’s dialogue.  I know that most of the dialogue takes place ‘within the game’ but delivered in dead-pan deliberation the actual lines are at the level of a subpar Monty Pythan spoof.

The Duke of Burgundy script, without a driving idea or perception, lacking in tensions has no where to go and ends up going nowhere.  To the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees the bugs and bug talk asking the viewer to buy into spliced manipulation rather than significance.   Strickland’s film traps the audience on the surface of life but it’s a flat dull surface.   

If you really identify with flat surface, then this is the movie for you.  So perhaps it’s an identity thing.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk