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the way each target shares different aspects of our protag’s personality/past (work obsession, fading marriage; fatherhood and pride; alcoholism and love of nature — with the method of the last murder reprising a traumatic turning point that his wife brings up) or the small moments marking developments in his marriage.

Was wondering whether I was correctly feeling Park (perhaps via Westlake) weave <i>Rear Window</i> elements through a work whose plot bears little relation, or if the voyeuristic interactions and garden burial were just pulp tropes. But like Stewart’s bachelor scanning the courtyard and seeing potential relationship scenarios, Yoo Man-su is seeing the stages of his family falling apart. A close but antagonized couple where the wife has turned toward an affair; a divorced father demeaning himself to support and stay connected with his daughter; a divorcee whose obsessions have driven his wife away. The real tension is always at home.

His task gets easier as he goes along, not just because he’s getting better at what he’s doing and becoming a dehumanized tool of the system (he even pauses before committing his final, perhaps unnecessary murder to do some cost/benefit analysis), but because successive targets are more isolated. Man-su still has the advantage of one support network. (One of the currents running through this is how families absorb stresses brought home to them.) But heartbreakingly, his path involves removing another. He still bonds with each of his victims in some way, still learns from them, all while he’s hollowing himself and gutting (deforesting?) the field of colleagues who share his peculiar expertise on the way to realizing the film’s double-edged title.

It’s such sad comedy. But though it ends with a man alone in the dark laughing at a tragedy, it also shares a flare of father’s hope with PTA and One Battle After Another: Here the daughter, often unable to connect to the world, has invented her own visual language while she carries old culture on.

First off the character dances around but dodges most clichéd bullets of a housewife driving her husband to murder. We saw her tighten up the family budget, take on a part-time job, and even act proactively to salvage her incriminated son. Yet it seems no matter how well she does her job of being a 'decent' and supportive wife as society expects her to be, her acts still subliminally push her husband toward the mental cliff of murder. It doesn't seem she has a choice either. She cannot change her husband's perception of her. For example, she goes to work for a young male acquaintance that may or may not have romantic feelings for her (and vice versa) but did nothing out of the way, but still the husband plays up the cuckold and pegs this jealousy into his narrative of no other choice but murder. In another case she lets slip the fantasy of all other candidates conveniently disappearing, an innocuous joke, which nevertheless planted the seed in her husband's more serious mind. I could see her husband shouting to her "You gave me the idea and neglected to ask me what I was doing all these nights out there, so you're the de facto accomplice!" in her back mind. This leads her to admit to her part in the husband's wrongdoings of which she actually knows exactly nothing about. The reveal was played out by cutting between parallel actions of the husband and wife, as if they act in concertedness. But we feel the emotional center of gravity firmly on her: she is the one left to lie to her child and issue the pardon on her husband's crimes, not just to those other candidates but to the family as well. The final scene of the daughter playing the cello hits so hard on her that it leads to her collapse. This reminds me of the final scene of Margaret, a film that could not be more different from this one but shares a similar cathartic moment when a character is forced to acknowledge the disintegration of innocence and learns to live with guilt for the rest of her life.