Was really bummed to miss this when it was playing in theaters, glad to finally catch it. Park Chan-wook has often struck me as an heir to De Palma and Hitchcock, as well as being a master of the sort of compositions (and compositing) of peers like the Wachowski sisters and David Fincher. The visual storytelling here is so full of pleasures: reflections in devices, sudden cuts to characters’ shadows, shots from inside objects, wide shots tracking characters through space from an elevation.
I did not expect it to be so funny, filled with absurdist humor and Lee Byung-hun’s undercutting his good looks with a slapstick physicality. Son Ye-jin…perhaps I will finally watch Crash Landing on You.
If there’s one aspect that leaves this a bit short of The Handmaiden or Decision to Leave, it’s that I didn’t really feel the sweaty desperation this story needed. The debts and mishaps and humiliations pile up, but somehow I don’t feel the hopelessness driving Lee Byung-hun’s Man-su. The story feels a bit like it’s on rails, with the outcome never really in doubt, even if the final scene wants to complicate your feelings. (I’m reminded of the ending to Richard Linklater’s Hit Man.)
Random note: there’s a scene in here that made me flash back to a bone-crunching episode of The Americans that was so grisly to contemplate that my wife noped out of the series permanently.