Metrograph

Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax—the story of a middle-aged middle manager who, after becoming a casualty of downsizing, embarks on a particularly violent job hunt—finds an ideal interpreter in Park, no stranger to generous gore, who relocates the action to contemporary South Korea, with Lee Byung-hun as his down-on-his-luck lead. A wicked comedy made with an unerringly steady hand, and a cutting commentary on the corporate rat race that tacitly encourages those locked in its maze to gnaw one another to pieces for survival. “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… A deadpan note of knockabout black comedy is never entirely absent.” —The Guardian

Distributor: NEON