29
Dec/15

CURATORS’ CHOICE: OFFICE

29
Dec/15
OFFICE

A lowly intern (Ko Ah-sung) discovers some strange goings-on in Hong Won-chan’s OFFICE

OFFICE (오피스) (OPISEU) (HUA LI SHANG BAN ZU) (Hong Won-chan, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, January 3, $12 (includes gallery admission), 4:30
Series runs January 1-10
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Following its prestigious midnight film screening at Cannes this past May, Hong Won-chan’s debut feature, Office, was the opening-night selection of the 2015 New York Korean Film Festival in November at the Museum of the Moving Image. If you missed it then, you have another chance to see it in Queens on January 3, as it is one of eight films that comprise the museum’s “Curators’ Choice” series, its annual survey of some of the best films of the year. In the contemporary thriller, written by Choi Yun-jin (Steel Cold Winter), Seoul salaryman Kim Byung-Guk (Bae Seong-woo) calmly comes home from work one night and butchers his family with a hammer. The next morning, Detective Jong-hoon (Park Sung-woong) arrives at the office with plenty of questions, but no one has much to say about the killer, who was part of sales team #2 — although they are clearly hiding something. Only frazzled, insecure, wide-eyed intern Lee Mirae (Ko Ah-sung), who had a friendly relationship with Kim, wants to tell the truth, but she keeps her mouth shut, harassed by her boss (Ryu Hyun-kyung) and director Kim (Kim Eui-sung). When it is discovered that the murderer returned to the office after committing his vicious crime and may still be in the building, the tension ramps up, as does the body count.

Hong, who has written such films as Confession of Murder and The Chaser, does a good job skewering the work environment and office politics, a world of identical cubicles where personal lives and relationships take a backseat to the drive to succeed at all costs, even with a killer on the loose, and nearby. “All organizations are the same,” Detective Jong-hoon tells Mirae. “Even us police. . . . It’s all pointless.” Mirae, effectively played by Ko (Snowpiercer, The Host) with a tentative charm, represents the average Korean worker who tries her best but seems doomed never to take that next step onto the fast track. Fraught with concern over Kim’s whereabouts, she is also threatened by the hiring of another, highly competitive intern, Da-min (Son Su-hyun), who is much better liked by everyone. The narrative grows confusing as it jumps back and forth between the present and the past, and there are plot holes that require viewers to make various leaps of faith, but Office is still an intriguing, sharp-looking mystery with a handful of cool shocks and scares that might make you wonder who in your office could be capable of completely flipping out one day. Office is screening January 3 at 4:30; the series, programmed by chief curator David Schwartz and associate film curator Eric Hynes, includes such other cool films as Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, and Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon.