Don McKellar

In The Sympathizer (2024) a communist mole follows the South Vietnamese general he is supposed to be betraying out of Saigon and into Los Angeles, and he narrates it himself, which is the first thing to distrust. The narrator has his version of the war, Hollywood is filming another in the background, and the series is a running argument between the two. That is the Don McKellar habit: a story with more than one owner, told deadpan, with a joke under it and something sourer under the joke. He said of the series that "We wanted this dizzying feel, the multiplicity of voices competing to tell the story", and for once a writer describing his own method has got it right.

The habit was there from the start. He came out of Toronto theatre and Bruce McDonald's Roadkill (1989), and his first film as director, Last Night (1998), which he wrote and starred in, put a handful of people through the last evening of the world and watched what they did with it, most of it funny and some of it not. The same year he co-wrote The Red Violin, one instrument passed hand to hand across centuries and continents, and in 2008 he adapted José Saramago's Blindness and acted in it, a film that split its audience. Along the way he worked with Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and François Girard. The shape is plain enough: he likes an ensemble, a structure that shows its joins, and material other writers would call unfilmable.

The pairing with Park Chan-wook is where we can speak with most confidence. The Sympathizer is handsome, clever and often funny, and Hoa Xuande carries it; it also tells its one joke about casting five times, and the middle episodes drift while the series works out what it is for. No Other Choice (2025) is the better piece of work. McKellar is one of four writers who move Donald E. Westlake's The Ax from American paper to Korea without anything feeling forced, and they add a firm that is replacing its people with software, so that Lee Byung-hun's Man-su is not really competing with the men he sets out to kill. He is competing with a machine, and they are in the way. When the film laid that out we laughed, and then we were uneasy for the rest of it, because the arithmetic is sound. It also runs long and repeats itself, and Park's pictures carry stretches the script does not.

That is the caveat with McKellar in this phase. He has found a director who shares his taste for the deadpan and for a story that argues with itself, and neither of them yet knows when a point has been made. Start with No Other Choice, then the series, and stay for its second half, which is where the argument about who owns the story finally pays.