London Film Festival 2025 - a Korean masterclass in black comedy and a Camus classic effectively realised

No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook’s outstanding black comedy is a rare treat, biting social satire delivered with immaculate slapstick touches. His everyman hero is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a jittery but deliriously happy man with a beautiful wife (superstar Son Ye-jin) and two children, one an accomplished cellist. Even his two dogs are handsome. And he loves his work at a paper manufacturer. Naturally, all comes crashing down when his company is taken over by Americans and a chunk of the workforce has to go, including him. As do his dogs, his nice car and many of his belongings. With his marriage wobbling, Man-su vows to get it all back but can’t even hold down a shelf-stacking job.

How he claws his way out of this hole, at one point literally, is the cue for a storyline that’s a giddy blend of pathos and farce. Man-su’s highly logical plan is to eliminate his top three rivals for the few paper-industry jobs on offer. As in, kill them. He prepares a 3D-printer gun and starts researching his quarry. Predictably, this nervous bonsai-grower is not a natural born killer, and his first foray into homicide, by dropped plant pot, is mistaken for weightlifting practice by an old lady onlooker. Each of his victims is a person he gets to know; all are as forlorn as he is, victims twice over. He copes by tapping his head and repeating a mantra he learned at a comically awful training session for the jobless: “No other choice”. 

This is a faultlessly executed piece, intricately plotted and wittily choreographed – one murder, at a house in the woods, is a tour de force of sustained goofs and pratfalls. The dance party in fancy dress is a terrific set piece too. But it’s more than great physical comedy. It’s elevated by the acerbic irony of Park's take on modern life, which leaves Man-su a victim of the changing world twice over. You wince as much as you giggle, especially at its bittersweet payoff. Pure class. (Out in 2026)

Below the Clouds

Gianfranco Rosi’s black and white documentary about Naples takes an unusual route to its subject: this “disembowelled city”, as it’s described by a prosecutor. He’s hunting the tomb robbers who have patiently tunnelled into its old burial chambers to remove their treasures, even the frescos on the walls. The camera, too, goes underground a lot, looking for treasure, notably in the basement of the Archaeological Museum, where a woman curator lovingly visits her oggetti: ancient statuary that can’t find a home up in the display rooms. Like a number of people the film follows – the enraged prosecutor, an elderly after-school teacher, a Japanese expert leading a dig at Herculaneum – she is a conduit to the city’s sense of itself. Elsewhere the vigili of the fire department deal with problems above ground, despatching soothing answers to callers convinced there has been an earthquake (there often has) or simply terrified by a drunken violent husband. One regular just calls to ask the time.It’s a long slow watch, often filmed at night, where little trains chug along overgrown tracks. Vesuvius (pictured above) is always a presence, visible out of the train windows, its rumblings sending big clouds of steam out of holes in the hillside. Sometimes you think you see it when you don’t, as when a drift of what looks like stones moves down a slope at the pace of molten lava. But it’s a mountain of Ukrainian corn that’s being offloaded by a Syrian cargo vessel, a reminder of the port city’s key role in food distribution as the Roman Empire grew. For the war-plagued Syrians, it’s a “safe” and “beautiful” city, not a place steeped in natural violence where teenagers now set fire to the land.

There is little that’s predictable or touristic in this portrait (no pizza!): it’s a haunting journey into the psyche of this resonant place.

The Stranger

The opening credits of François Ozon’s adaptation of the Camus classic suggest he is going to go full pastiche. The old Gaumont animated ident appears, followed by an old-fashioned map of north Africa; then a jaunty newsreel expounds the joys of living in Algiers now that French colonists have done up the place a bit. But after this, Ozon bows to the original text, an interior monologue ideal for becoming the protagonist’s voice-over, sometimes word for word. What he is paying homage to is the look and feel of the black and white classics he presumably grew up with, full of shadow play and odd-looking character actors, notably Denis Lavant as a man in a love/hate relationship with his ageing dog.

As his affect-less lead, Meursault, Benjamin Voisin (pictured right) is perhaps more handsome than the man of my imagination. But he catches the odd impassivity of Meursault’s behaviour, a prisoner of ennui who claims most social constructs have no meaning, especially “love” and “marriage”. His lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral becomes a significant strike against him when he is on trial later for the murder of an “Arabe”, a teenager threatening an acquaintance of his, whom he shot when he produced a knife. Or was it because the sun glinted off the blade into his eyes and blinded him momentarily? “I had upset the balance of the day,” is his blank response. Ozon renders this scene with convincing precision. 

In the novel’s heated climactic scene with a prison chaplain (Swann Arlaud), Meursault rails against the world, pronouncing it absurd, God non-existent and his actions ones he would repeat without regret. This is fairly cerebral material, but Ozon rises to its challenges exceptionally well, creating a period piece with striking images and real heft. The scene where Meursault dreams of his execution by guillotine on a lonely hilltop is masterly and chilling.

The World of Love

A Korean film with a female director, Yoon Ga-eun, this probes the impact of sexual assault and abuse on the young. Centrestage is Ju-in (Seo Soo-bin), a tomboyish, loud 17-year-old who is regularly involved in classroom fights and can’t sustain a relationship with a boy. Her mother is increasingly inebriated, leaving her to supervise her livewire younger brother; their father has fled to a quiet life in the country. When Su-ho, a swotty, articulate classmate, tries to get Ju-in to sign a petition protesting the release of a local sex offender from prison, her traumas begin to surface. Her classmates, meanwhile, are obsessed with the mechanics of their genitals, while her best friend, a budding cartoonist, sketches sex scenes in the stylised fashion of popular comic-books, far from the reality around her.

As we learn more about the source of Ju-in’s often violent behaviour, we also follow the sad experience of Mi-do, a former tae kwon do medallist who has quit training after an assault and now works with a band of women of all ages who act as her support group. Mi-do’s insensitive treatment at the hearing of her case is depressingly predictable.  

The high level of acting in this piece is impressive, especially that of its young protagonist, Seo Soo-bin, in her screen debut, a natural in front of the camera, Yoon is there to register and interrogate, not angrily militate, though what she finds is pretty heartbreaking. Ju-in’s experience, though, is heartening: she learns that taking some blows on the chin, not constantly trying to fight them, will earn her a greater understanding of what has happened to her, and of what she needs to do to prevent it from ruining her life. 

Silent Friend

Writer-director Ildikó Enyedi has created a triptych united by the theories of Linnaeus and a gingko biloba tree in a German university’s botanical garden. Tony Leung-Chiu-wai (pictured below left) plays a visiting scientist whose specialism is the nature of consciousness: brain waves have indicated that babies don’t have “spotlight" focus, where the brain shuts down everywhere except the area of interest, they are naturally “high”, with all synapses firing at once. He starts to wonder whether natural organisms have a similar form of intelligence and hooks the tree up to monitors. Fascinated by the same tree in 1972 is a young local lad, Hannes, who has a crush on a botany student; she is also probing the intelligence of plants, attaching sensors to a geranium. The third strand is set in 1908, when a botany student, Grete, discovers photography and starts recording the garden’s plant life. 

Beneath the scientific inquiry, however, are social currents that force the three searchers to seek the assistance of others. The scientist is stranded, virtually alone, by Covid, at first at war with the groundsman, who is suspicious of his odd activities; Hannes has to watch his loved one embark on hippyesque flings with other students; Grete is hounded by the pompous old sexists on the faculty. Each finds a form of release, and new friendships. Leung’s is with the groundsman and also with a French scientist (Léa Seydoux) he communicates with online, who tells him she has discovered gingkos have a gender. His tree, unusually, is female, so she sends him “sperm” for it, to ease its loneliness.

I have no idea whether any of the science here is valid, but it’s a beautifully realised, gently teasing film, full of striking images and a mesmerising turn from Leung, that you ultimately understand is about the power of friendship and collaboration.

Rental Family 

A feelgood bonbon to chase away the January blues. Writer-director Hikari uses Brendan Fraser (pictured below with Shannon Gorman) to best effect as a gaijin trying to make it as an actor in the human anthill that is Tokyo. He goes up for auditions but lands nothing meaty; his greatest claim to fame is a hilarious commercial where he appears as a tube of toothpaste. From his teeny apartment he watches the mini-dramas in the little cells in the block opposite. Then his agent calls with a rush job as a Sad American. He stumbles late into what turns out to be a funeral, and from here his life takes a bizarre turn. He has been hired as a fake – a mourner, an absent father, a bridegroom, a journalist – through the Rental Family agency, by clients seeking a lost or non-existent emotional connection.Soon he starts enjoying the role, often playing somebody who helps mend broken relationships or fulfils somebody’s fondest dream. His boss’s assistant, meanwhile, gets a lot of “apology” jobs, posing as a husband’s lover that the wife can slap, leaving her husband free to return to his real lover. But in some cases he goes too far, worrying a mother who had hired him to play her daughter Mia’s missing dad and help get her through a tough interview for entry into a posh school. Another client he gets too close to is a venerable film actor who uses Philip as a travelling companion to his former rural home. 

Hikari keeps the pacing steady, throwing in some nifty twists in the final reel. He gets a genial performance from Fraser, a big lumbering presence here, but one with a gentleness and sweetness to it. (Jan 16)

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