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In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave) crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. South Korea’s Academy Awards submission for Best Foreign Film, this adaptation of the 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel "The Ax," updated for our precarious moment in time, is enthralling all the way to its brilliant bitter pill of an ending.
In a fine tightrope-walk of a performance, Lee Byung Hun (Squid Games) brings humor and likability to the tricky role of Man-soo, a middle-aged husband and father who has been laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has devoted decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, Man-soo begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer, leading to wild—and ever more absurd—acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable and extravagant pitch-black comic style.
Reviews
"But Park’s film — despite skewering capitalism with much of the same wit, sadness, and slapstick buffoonery that made Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” so resonant around the world — is pointedly not about poverty... it’s a Looney Tunes-like fable about how capitalism exerts itself by feeding our self-images as it fattens our wallets, and by conflating what we do with who we are to the point that one becomes dependent upon the other." –IndieWire
As part of our See Change initiative, we strive to showcase the work of women and non-binary individuals and their behind-the-scenes involvement in a production.
This film is written by Lee Kyoung-mi and Jahye Lee, and produced by Michèle Ray-Gavras, and Jisun Back.
All showtimes are at the Ruth Sokolof – Mary theater unless otherwise noted.
