Park Chan-wook's film opens as an Ealing-style caper and evolves into a penetrating portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity, and national economic malaise. The protagonist You Man-su, a devoted family man and paper-factory employee, loses his job after an American takeover and struggles to articulate his devastation. Determined to restore his role as breadwinner before severance expires, he invents a fake paper-based recruitment scheme that excludes online applications, creating no digital trail. The plot mixes digressive set-pieces, trance-like visions, and black-comic tone while interrogating redundancy, pride, and desperate reinvention amid corporate brutality.
Korean director Park Chan-wook's new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis, and the state of the nation itself.
The scene is a perfect family home, where the man of the house, You Man-su (played by Korean star Lee Byung-hun), is benignly presiding over a late-summer barbecue in the garden, grilling some eels that have been given to him by the new American owners of the paper factory where he is employed. Adoringly looking on are his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), her teen son from a previous marriage, their daughter (a cello prodigy), and their two lovely Labradors.
But those eels are in fact a heartless and misjudged part of a job payoff; the new US masters are driving through brutal redundancies and Man-su is among them. He is devastated, but without the emotional language to express or understand how profound this loss is to him. He is fanatically desperate to reclaim his manhood in the eyes of his wife, children and pets by getting a new job in the paper industry within the three months before his severance pay runs out.
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