Humans redundant?

No other choice(Korean, 2025)

Director: Park Chan-wook

https://www.cineart.be/nl/films/no-other-choice

Another interesting release from the land of kimchi. After the phenomenal success of 'Parasite' and the subsequent heart-racing Korean dramas, this must be it. A social satire told as a black comedy in the wackiest way. 

We think we all have agency to choose whatever we like. We feel entitled to demand what we want. We think we have the option to choose. In reality, we have 'no other choice'.

We think we are indispensable in our jobs. We feel that if we do not show up for work, the office will shut down. Not true.

In the modern world, automation was the first to pose a threat to our livelihoods. Robotics replaced people in doing mundane, repetitive jobs. Now, 

we have to live in the real fear of being slashed in corporate restructuring and cost-cutting exercises, and artificial intelligence (AI) hangs over our heads like Damocles' sword. Seniority and experience mean nothing in a world where dollars and cents mean everything.

The movie starts with the definition of bliss. It is spring, and a happy family with a pair of kids is having a barbecue in the garden of their huge ancestral home, enjoying each other's company. Man-su is a happy man. After 25 years at the paper mill, he received an appraisal from his bosses.

Before he knew it, Man-su was given a pink slip. The new American bosses decide to downsize by slashing the middle management. The bosses say, "they have no other choice." A devastated Man-su has to go. One by one, his life crumbles. He gives himself three months to get another job, with his extensive experience. But it is not easy. 17 months later, he is still struggling with odd jobs. His wife has to return to work as a dental assistant and give up her country club lifestyle. They have to give away their two Labradors to cut costs. He cannot afford to send his daughter, whom the teacher thinks is a cello prodigy, for further training. The family decides to sell their ancestral house, too.

In the midst of all that, the husband-wife relationship takes a dip, with both thinking the other is up to no good. Man-su attends an interview for a post at a paper mill but finds that three other candidates have stronger supporting qualifications, making them the favourites to be chosen. So Man-su thought eliminating (killing) them would increase his chances of securing the post. And that is what he goes on to do.

The wife suspects his activities, but she decides to look the other way. She had no other choice. Accepting her as a single mum, Mun-su had married her and given her a good life. She did not want her children to grow up without a father. Hence, the wife tries to hide certain facts when the police came knocking on their door enquiring about the missing interviewees.

There are many nuanced references to the way we, as workers, have no other choice but to dance to the tune of conglomerates that do not value labour but commodify it as disposable. Human experience means nothing as all that the human mind has learned over the break of civilisation has been digitalised to be run by AI. The middle management has lost its relevance. And the upper management has been downgraded to supervise their jobs. Only that the labour force and middle management job is automated.

In the case of paper production, with relevance to this story, trees are cut by machines. The expertise of lumberjacks is unnecessary. At the paper plant, shredding of trees into pulp is also automated. Machines do the quality control and trivial odds and ends. The role of the human is just oversee that there is no glitch in the system.

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Decide and chug along...

Revelations (Korean, 2025)

Director: Yeon Sang-ho

Although the ratings for this one were not very encouraging, the storyline made its viewers think.

No one knows the right course of action or what is contained in their recipe for good deeds. We merely drag our unfortunate selves along, clinging to straws, persuading ourselves that our actions are virtuous. No one can say whether our actions will lead to the best outcome in the grand scheme.

The movie explores what goes through the minds of three individuals who are somehow involved in the killing of a young girl and the kidnapping of another. There is a possible paedophile out on parole, wearing an ankle monitor. He seems to be following a young girl who enters a church. The paedophile follows into the church. The pastor notices him as a newcomer to the church and tries to woo him to join the congregation.

The pastor has a lot on his plate. He hopes to be promoted to a larger church, and he is troubled by his wife's infidelity.

One day, he forgot to pick up his son from school. Both he and his wife assume that their son has been kidnapped. The pastor suspects it must be the peculiar man with an ankle monitor. He hunts him down, believing he has killed him. Shortly thereafter, the wife informs them that a friend has collected their son.

The paedophile is also being followed by a police officer whose sister died after being kidnapped by him. Although she was released later, she took her own life due to social media shaming and PTSD.

The latter is assigned to investigate the paedophile after he went missing, having been assaulted by the pastor. Then it gets interesting…

So we end up with three people who want to do things beyond the bounds of decency but somehow find justifications for their actions.

The pastor wants to make sure that the paedophile is killed off before the police find him. The paedophile might say that the pastor tried to kill him. An arrest would destroy everything he had built for himself, work-wise and in his family life. He seriously sees signs from God that tell him he is on the right track. When he sees the clouds, an apparition resembling Mother Mary, and Jesus tells him to carry on, so he thinks, What else could he ask for?

The police officer thinks she failed the first time when her sister died. So, hunting down and killing the sadistic weirdo is justified. The question of her being a police officer does come into the equation. She sees images of her crying sister asking to seek revenge.

The criminal does not think he is doing anything wrong. All the voices in his head tell him so. His learned experience from his abusive childhood taught him so, too.

In the end, all three people have justifications to do all the things they want to do. While all these are happening, this church-going mother has lost her daughter. The pastor has to sit down with her to pray for the safe return of her child, who may have been abducted by the same criminal.

There is no secret formula for us to follow in this voyage of life. Every time the wind blows, we just hoist the sail, catch the wind and make intelligent guesses about where to navigate the boat. No self-proclaimed expert navigator can help you on this one.

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Nothing really changes...

Squid Games 2 (Korean; 2024)

Miniseries, E1-E7.

Continuing with Season 1, Squid Game (SqG) moves into a new set of games featuring a fresh group of players. Admittedly, SqG 2 is not as captivating as its predecessor. The storyline is predictable, and viewers can easily discern who will survive and which characters will likely be eliminated.

 

Nevertheless, while engrossed in the miniseries, I noticed that the entire storyline symbolises the challenges Malaysia's thinking voters face regarding democratic governance under their duly elected government.

To provide context, the games in SqG2, much like those in SqG1, involve teamwork and lethal consequences for the losers. An amendment was made to the clause allowing players to vote on whether to proceed to the next game. After each match, the accumulated betting money increases. If the players, by majority, choose to discontinue, the funds would be divided equally, and the games would be halted. Humans, being inherently human, are rarely satisfied with their earnings and are perpetually convinced of their invincibility, leading the majority to vote in favour of continuing. Despite the awareness that death is imminent and high probability with dwindling numbers of players, they do this. Not only are the losers killed, but players also engage in combat against one another to maximise their returns.

Most players are aware of their futility. Still, the lure of wealth and their hopelessness in solving various personal monetary issues push them further into the game's abyss.

 

After the shock of discovering 1MDB and the brazen ways the ruling elite manipulated the nation's wealth and sovereignty, Malaysians took to the streets to change the status quo. They believed they had the best candidate in Malaysia's disgraced former deputy Prime Minister. Citizens with differing ideologies on how a country should be governed united to oust Goliath from his throne. In this struggle, natural prey and predators joined forces. The prey wished their predators would turn vegetarian, while the predators hoped their food could live another day.

 

Thus, individuals with various financial issues were lured into the Squid Game as players. They convinced themselves they would only partake in this dangerous game until they had sufficient money. Once that was achieved, they would return to their everyday lives. Only when the moolah began rolling in did they reveal their true colours. Some are inherently malevolent, but the rest tolerate them. When push came to shove, their true forms manifested in full glory.

In Malaysia, once power started coming into their hands, the newly elected leaders, who were supposed to be flagbearers of the new dawn, recoiled into the malaise of their predecessors. Like the pigs in Animal Farm, they soon appeared as bipeds, forgetting their usual struggle to stay aground on all fours. The pigs use the same lingo, address the issues in the same manner, and continue the same oppressive laws. The intoxicating plunge into power gives our leaders the compulsion to stay in power forever, using whatever is available at their disposal, race, religion, distorted history, money or the convincing nod from the divine powers.

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Escaping the glance of Lady Justice?

Taxi Driver (Miniseries, S1E1-16; Korean; 2021)

With the wisdom proffered by age and experiences learned from the School of Hard Knocks, I am convinced that life is convoluted. Nothing one does is 100% right or good; conversely, not doing is not always wrong. If one can justify his actions and give convincing rhetoric, he can be considered a do-gooder. 

The miniseries is about this in sixteen episodes and more than 16 hours altogether. In the crooks-filled metropolitan city of Seoul, there is no shortage of murderers and serial killers. After the tedious process of investigating, collecting evidence and prosecuting, the victims and their relatives find that the courts are pretty docile. More often than not, the accused go scot-free. Sometimes, they get away with a slap on the wrist or technical issues. The feeling is that the perpetrators never feel the pain that the victims and their families endured. To add injury to insult, the wrongdoers mock the system, police and the accusers and carry on the things they do best with impunity. 

With increasingly intelligent lawyers with crooked minds to catch the obscure loophole in the law, more wrongdoers escape the glance of Lady Justice (because she is blindfolded?). Because law practitioners find better remuneration defending the accused than prosecuting them, the best ones bend over backwards to get them off the hook. Forensic sciences have improved by leaps and bounds, and so have the ways to create the element of doubt. The fear of punishing a single innocent person over letting a guilty person for free is always there. The need to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt is always the mantra.

Victims of serial killers get together to apprehend to mete their own brand of punishment under the guise of running a taxi company. To help out in their endeavour, they get the help of a local mafia lady boss. Hot on their trail is a young prosecutor who senses something fishy going on under the hood of the taxi company.

The season tackles many societal issues that often go unnoticed. A mentally challenged lady is abused at a factory that was supposedly set up for the specially-abled. The culture of workplace bullying to achieve better sales hits the roof when someone is beaten up. A high school boy is bullied because he is poor. The protagonist of the show, an ex-army, had his mother killed by a mad killer and has set his life mission to save victims of the evil elements of society. He passes his name card to the person he thinks needs his help. In this vigilante group are the CEO of an NGO, a hacker and two mechanics.

In the later episodes, the vigilante group realise that they have been cheated by the Mafia, who opt to monetise the prisoners by harvesting their organs! A three-cornered pursuit starts, with the police and public prosecutor's office on one side, the other being the Mafia and the vigilante group.

Playing by the book may not be the best; neither is taking the law into your own hands. What if the situation and circumstances squarely put the wrong person as guilty? It happened in this miniseries. A man was wrongly jailed for 20 years only to be released later after the real killer confessed. Who will return the 20 years of loss of respect, job, love, family life, seeing the world change, and living the one life he had been sent to Earth for?

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When you gaze into the abyss...

Passing through darkness.  (Miniseries, E1-E12, Korean; 2023)
Director: Park Ba-ram

Over the centuries, humans have agreed on how they should live life. Compassion, tolerance, and acceptance have been the mantras to sail through the rough waves in the high seas of life. We respect the other with the adage 'Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you' and think that should suffice for all to mind their own business and lead meaningful lives.

Life, as we know it, has been so easy. As if there is not enough of Nature's hostility towards over existence, there is danger from our own kind. Nature has dictated species protect their own kind. Still, violence and savagery are justified in the name of the continuity of species and territorial ambitions, which, in a way, also ensure the dissemination and dominance of species. Only in the human species do we humans kill another for the sheer pleasure of seeing someone die. Our inquisitive mind yearns to know what lies beyond the realm of life. Sending someone to the Otherside or just stepping momentarily into the gate of death and stepping back in gives some unbelievably enjoyable thrill and erotism.

We are stepping into the zone of dark, mind-bending psychological crimes. Some wonder if we are all inherently evil. Is that any truth that this is because we are all born out of the Original Sin, that we are all sinners and are at the Mercy of the Divine for Redemption?

Did 'civilisation' or living in communities mould us to behave in a particular manner? Numbers matter when we are exposed to dangers day in and day out in our early days of existence.

Remember our school days. Children who have not fully developed the inhibitory synapses of the frontal lobe say all the darnest. At the playgrounds, they can be pretty cruel, spewing venom with filters, leaving a spate of their schoolmates/playmates with developmental issues or social anxiety.

This Korean miniseries is not for the faint-hearted. It tells the tale of a criminal profiler and his team in the Behavioural Crime Analysis of the Seoul Metropolitan Police, who takes his work too seriously. Stemming from a near-drowning episode in his childhood, the detective develops the ability to empathise with both the victims and the perpetrators of the crimes he is tasked to solve.

This journey takes him and his dedicated team through a harrowing experience, questioning everything we try to pinpoint as the culprit to make someone turn to the dark side.

Is it the absence of a father figure as a child grows up? Is childhood trauma, sexual assault, corporal punishment, bullying or humiliation the culprit? Is the brain wiring to be blamed? What is at fault, Nature or Nurture? For every possible aggravating factor that may lure one to crime, many uproot themselves out of filth to be somebody. Is loneliness a precipitating factor? As Nietzsche said, 'If you gaze into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you!'

What about the people who often associate, investigate and peep into the lives of these vermins of society? Do those who fight with monsters should look into it so they do not become monsters? Scriptures say, 'You are the company you keep with'. A calf which hangs around a piglet would eventually feed on filth like hogs usually do, Amma used to say!

Before we say the cases are hyped to appease the viewers, the cases were reported by Korea's first criminal profiler, Kwon Il-yong and journalist-turned-author, Ko Na-mu.

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3 for the party of 2?

Past Lives (Korean/English; 2023)

Director: Celine Song

One thing that created the rift between two men who dared to venture into the crypt of our mind and try to explain why we act and react the way we do remains unresolved. 

Sigmund Freud posited, in simpler terms, that our learnt experiences, together with unresolved pervasive sexual desires, are the main reasons for actions, inaction and maladies. His mentee, Karl Jung, thought some external events and forces might manifest as meaningful coincidences.

The question is whether we have only one life, just here and now and then we die, or we come here again and again. The film is selling the Korean Buddhist idea of 'In Yun'. We are all somehow connected cosmologically through reincarnation. When we meet people and feel we know them, we may do. There may be some unsettled business that needed to be settled, left from our previous encounters, god knows when. This could be our umpteenth trans-birth meet. Or it could be a ruse to get into each other's pants. 

The Mahabharata is full of these stories of paying back the evil deeds of past lives. King Shantanu's first wife, the mighty Ganga, drowned seven of her newborns. The eight escaped. Her justification was that her eight children were the eight elements that acquired a curse from a sage for coveting a cow in their previous lives. Like that, every action and reaction in this epic has its roots in the past.

As it turns out, in the film, a thirty-something Korean girl whose family had migrated to North America has a chance to meet her childhood friend. The last time they met, they were twelve-year-old classmates who shared something of a puppy love. After migrating to Canada, the girl, No Young, changed her name to Nora and started life anew in her newfound home. The boy, Hae Sung, stayed and progressed in his own way. Out of sight, but not really out of mind. The lost touch.

3 for the party of 2?

With the help of social media, they reconnected twelve years later. Life took its course; Nora got married, Hae Sung went to study in China, got into a relationship and failed. Another twelve years later, Hae Sung announced his arrival in the USA. This created an awkward situation between the three in the party of two. Nora's white husband worries she might return to her first love. Nora fears rekindling the old relationship, and Hae Sung is probably a forlorn romantic. 

The story is about how they resolve an issue that is a non-issue. After being tied down in a relationship, it is human nature to wonder how life would be if we had taken a different path. That is when we should slap ourselves awake, douse water on our faces and remind ourselves that whichever path we take, the journey and the outcome are invariably the same. The paths may vary, but both would be filled with ups, downs, joy, heartbreaks, achievements and letdowns. Just eat what we have, enjoy the flavour served and stop wondering what another flavour would have tasted. The end result, we know.

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The pressure cooker life?

Beef (Miniseries, S1E1-E10; 2023)

Netflix

This convoluted drama reveals the whole message behind its story only in the last two episodes of the season. Suddenly everything made sense. It tries to show how fragile we are as a society, to maintain peace and to fit in. We pull up a front to portray an image of Zen to the outside world, but deep inside, we hate the person beside us. We wish we could just wring their necks. Unfortunately, civil society does allow this. So we suppress that urge. As we did in our cavemen days, we yearn to be part of the pack to hunt together. Our strengths lie in our numbers.

We exhibit specific behaviours in front of people but let our hair down and show our true inner demons under the cloak of anonymity. In public, we are expected to utter certain pre-ordained niceties. When somebody mentions death, the automatic response is, "I am sorry!" irrespective of whether he died as a national hero or OD'ed. We are expected to put a smiley face in public, no matter how low morale or bad our day has been. We may have had a shitty day at the office, or a Damocles sword could be hanging over our necks over a misadventure. Our professional reputation may be at stake over a misjudgement.

In this cut-throat world where everybody is trying to make a cut for himself, the stresses of the job bring out the worst in us. Yet we are expected to wear an Odin mask but with a perpetual grin.

In a world where siblings care for each other, sometimes love smothers. Instead of stirring interests, it muffles them. In the name of doing the best, it is quite the opposite.

Many things are expected of us in this lifetime - to leave our mark, succeed in life, acquire wealth, continue our progeny, exhibit filial piety, conform to societal expectations, and so on. Go marry and be merry, but can you?

This film shows two characters who are actually on the same life journey with similar life ambitions but end up on opposing sides of society. They kept bottling up the anger of their unfulfilled dreams and the pressures of wanting to mould themselves into doing the 'correct' thing. It reached a point of no return when these two characters honked at each other at a supermarket car park.

Danny, a Korean American handyman, was in the USA with his brother Paul. Danny's sole ambition is to make it big in his business with his brother, build a house and bring his parents from Korea. Somehow all his endeavours proved unfruitful. On the other hand, Paul is just loafing around, just playing computer games. Danny feels he is a failure and wants to kill himself. He was at the supermarket returning the wrong burner that he had bought. He had tried to gas himself dead.

The other character is Amy. She is an example of a rags-to-riches success story. She was born Vietnamese and made it big, selling boutique potted plants. He has a husband and a young daughter. She is planning to lure a wealthy lady into investing in her company. Deep inside, she is still unhappy, undergoing an existential crisis, and finding no purpose in it all. She has many unresolved long-standing issues with her parents growing up.

The near hit at the car park was the straw that broke the camel's back. It spiralled into road rage, a tit-for-tat, social media trolling, and sabotaging, which climaxed to each other going for the jugular.

In the last two episodes, we see them stranded in the woods and fighting for survival. They have to depend on each other to stay alive. A good watch which showcases the Maya of what we see. The world is a big show, and we are acting our roles, reading the script. We are to follow the scripts carefully or risk expulsion. Just maybe, if we alter the words slightly, the final product may shine brighter. Is it worth the try?

PS Sometimes Easterners go with a chip on their shoulders, thinking that their way of living is superior to the Western philosophy, which they believe to be so individualistic and self-centred. At the end of the day, they would soon realise that either way of thinking has its shortcomings.

Quotable Quotes from the Miniseries


    'You ever notice how people who have money think that money isn't important?'

    'Jesus did all those nice things, and look at what they did to him.'

    'Western therapy doesn't work on Eastern minds.'

    'God's just trying not to feel alone in nothingness.'

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