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Where is the line drawn between taking away a livelihood, and a life? In the modern age, people never get sacked — just downsized, rightsized and let go. The real meaning has never changed, though, a brutal truth well captured in The Ax, a 1997 satirical novel about redundancy by US writer Donald E Westlake.
Adapting the book into a midnight-dark comedy, virtuoso South Korean director Park Chan-wook nudges the title back towards the polite: No Other Choice. But the implicit violence of lowering a headcount is soon put front and centre. Restructuring has never been so bloody.
The knives are out from the start. When we first meet protagonist Man-su (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), he is a model of a certain kind of traditional male success. The house is gated, the mother of his children, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), a stay-at-home wife. Meat cooks on the barbecue. The film’s first sly joke is framing that scene like a primal triumph — really, Man-su is a soft-handed manager at a large paper manufacturer. The second is what brutish instincts arise once Man-su is dispensed with by his bosses.
Amid painful household economies, there is soon no meat on the barbecue, or even in the soup that Mi-ri makes her husband and the kids. (In another mordant touch, the couple’s son is left more distraught by the cancellation of Netflix.) So to the grisly heart of the matter. Faced with too many unemployed rivals for too few executive positions, Man-su decides to do more than polish his CV. Instead, he will start killing off the competition.
Rightfully a darling of film lovers, Park has left an auteurist signature on all kinds of genres: berserker revenge story Old Boy, lavish period kink with The Handmaiden, a sad Hitchcocky romance in Decision to Leave. Here, as Man-su turns murderous, the dial is set to antic comedy. This being Park, the slapstick also has symphonic brilliance, and sometimes even a mad kind of beauty. (You could take multiple images from the film and hang them on your wall, though guests may give you quizzical looks.)
Still, you do sometimes have the nagging feeling that you once you know the premise, you have already half-seen the movie. And set against the screams and pratfalls, subtler ideas can have a hard time being heard. They are there, through. The film is good on the male psyche. Man-su sees his lost job less as financial crisis than total emasculation (“We need to protect our women, right?” he tells his glum, Netflix-less son.)
Transporting The Ax to South Korea, Park gets culturally mischievous too. The director has long been interested in colonialism. (The Handmaiden was deeply tied up with it.) Here, an American takeover of Man-su’s company triggers the lay-offs that upend everyone’s world. The other snag might be the faint time-stamp to the project. The script takes the paper company straight from Westlake’s novel. That much may also remind viewers of the UK and US versions of The Office: both set in the same trade and, like the book, a product of the distant, almost quaint-seeming 1990s and 2000s.
But in time, Park brings things coolly up to date. Capitalism may offer much less choice than advertised, he tells us. The future may take even that away.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from January 23
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