Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: No Other Choice, The History of Sound, Saipan, Mercy

No Other Choice

(139 mins, 15) Directed by Park Chan-wook; starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon 

Few directors can orchestrate chaos as stylishly as Park Chan-wook. The South Korean director, whose past pictures include the bloody revenge thriller Oldboy and his 2022 breakout neo-noir romance Decision to Leave, has a knack for navigating slippery, serpentine plot twists with effortless elegance. His protagonists tend to be wily operators who dance through the story several moves ahead of their opponents.

No Other Choice leans further towards broad comedy – even slapstick at times – and lacks some of the mind-melting cerebral complexity of his most teasing mysteries. But in its supremely slick cinematography and crisp editing, it is unmistakably a Park picture.

Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is no machiavellian mastermind. He’s a hapless, clueless everyman supremely ill-suited to the violent rampage he embarks on. We first encounter him as a mid-level executive at a paper company. His is a blessed existence; he has a doting wife, likable children and a pair of handsome golden retrievers, all accompanied by deliberately cliched music choices and a gentle confetti of cherry blossom petals.

Then Man-su is abruptly fired from his job (the company has “no other choice”, he is told), and as the months of unemployment drag by, his desperation mounts. Digging out his father’s North Korean-made service revolver, he decides to eliminate his competition.

The tone may be comic, but the message is serious. The picture, which is based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, is a scathing satire of a business culture that views employees as an unnecessary expense. With the threat of AI looming large in a pointed final sequence, it feels uncomfortably relevant.

The History of Sound

(128 mins, 15) Directed by Oliver Hermanus; starring Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor fill this wistful, slow-burning gay love story with melancholy, longing and lots of nasal close harmony singing. Mescal plays Lionel, a Kentucky farm boy with, we’re told, a “gift from God”; O’Connor is the urbane orphan David, raised between England and the US. They meet in Boston 1917 – both are music students at the New England Conservatory – and their shared interest in obscure folk ballads blossoms into a powerful mutual attraction.

Their romance is cut short by the first world war: David is drafted, Lionel is spared, thanks to poor eyesight. At the end of the war, music brings them back together, as they set out on a joint venture collecting songs in the rural north of the country. It’s a revelatory trip for Lionel; a reminder that there is a world beyond his ramshackle farmstead and the consumptive disapproval of his mother.

This is a handsome and impeccably tasteful work from South African director Oliver Hermanus; the detailed period production design and, particularly, the use of music, brings texture to the lives of the two men. But it is subdued almost to the point of coyness, a story of passion undone by its polite execution.

Saipan

(90 mins, 15) Directed by Glenn Leyburn, Lisa Barros D’Sa; starring Éanna Hardwicke, Steve Coogan, Peter McDonald

It’s the eve of the 2002 Fifa World Cup, held in South Korea and Japan. Unusually, Ireland have qualified for the tournament, and with Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke, impressive) on the team, they might just have the opportunity to make a mark on the competition. But almost immediately things start to go wrong.

The training base in Saipan in the Pacific’s Mariana Islands is decidedly subpar; the pitch is full of rubble, the breakfast buffet consists of apologetic-looking cheese sandwiches and, remarkably, nobody has remembered to order any footballs.

Tensions between the forthright, notoriously chippy Keane and the dogged Ireland manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan) are fanned in the pages of tabloids. It’s a somewhat thin story: essentially, the film is a personality clash drama  about a disintegrating relationship between two mismatched egos, but in the hands of directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa  Barros D’Sa, it becomes a droll and gently entertaining blend of sports movie and soap opera.

Mercy

(100 mins, 12A) Directed by Timur Bekmambetov; starring Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis

The latest high-concept tech thriller from Kazakh-Russian film-maker Timur Bekmambetov (who directed Profile, and produced both Searching and Missing, all three of which unfolded almost entirely on computer and phone screens), Mercy is a step up in terms of ambition and world-building.

In a near-future Los Angeles, a detective (Chris Pratt) finds himself facing the same AI one-stop judge and execution service (a sublimely sinister Rebecca Ferguson) to which he has sent numerous doomed suspects. He has a raging hangover, inconvenient chunks of amnesia and just 90 minutes to prove himself innocent of his wife’s murder.

The AI judge has the authority to hack into every phone, doorbell camera and email account in the city, all of which are displayed as virtual screens in the courtroom (the option to watch the film in 3D adds visual interest). It’s pulpy, propulsive fun, but it reads alarmingly like a feature-length advertisement for mass surveillance.

Photographs by © Fair Winter LLC. All Rights Reserved/Aidan Monaghan Photographer