Park Chan-wook makes cruelty funny and complicated thrillers unexpectedly tender. We admire his control of the frame, but his films work best when he gives us someone to care about amid all the scheming.
Fi1m perspective
In No Other Choice (2025), a redundant paper-company employee decides that his prospects would improve if there were fewer applicants for the next job. Lee Byung-hun’s Man-su has a garden, a wife and two children; Park Chan-wook starts his murderous comedy with the ordinary fear of losing what we have. We laughed at the dreadful practicality of treating rival candidates as a problem to be removed. This is Park working well: the black humour comes from a recognisable worry pursued beyond reason.
His breakthrough came with Joint Security Area (2000), before the unofficial Vengeance Trilogy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005). Revenge and guilt recur, while the graphic violence in the trilogy divided critics. The more restrained romantic mystery of Decision to Leave (2022) makes a useful counterweight to those films. His interest in people under extreme pressure does not require the same treatment every time.
The Handmaiden (2016) makes the strongest case among the films we have reviewed for looking beyond the brutality. Park and co-writer Chung Seo-kyung adapt Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith with an appetite for complicated schemes, but they give us a reason to follow them. The attraction between the women matters, and Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri give the romance feeling. We could do with less of the camera’s pleasure in what it is allowed to show. Still, the plotting never makes the women’s feelings seem incidental.
Chung Chung-hoon’s cinematography, including on Oldboy, has helped give Park’s films their precision of framing. Editor Kim Sang-bum, production designer Ryu Seong-hie and composer Jo Yeong-wook are recurring collaborators; the care in these films is not his achievement alone. That care does not always extend to knowing when to stop. At 139 minutes, No Other Choice repeats its strongest joke, with the pictures carrying stretches the script cannot sustain. Start with The Handmaiden, and resist the urge to spend the whole evening trying to guess ahead.
Biography
Park Chan-wook is a South Korean film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Seoul on 23 August 1963, he studied philosophy at Sogang University and began his career as a film critic before directing his first features in the 1990s.
He came to prominence with Joint Security Area (2000), which he regards as his directorial debut. The film was followed by the Vengeance Trilogy—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005)—and later works including Thirst (2009), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022), the last of which won him the Best Director prize at Cannes.
In 2025 he directed, co-wrote and produced No Other Choice, a black comedy thriller adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax.
