Office

The space where many people spend their working days is no stranger to the screen, nor are the baser tendencies it can inspire in its daytime inhabitants. Where comedies such as 9 to 5, Working Girl and Office Space saw the lighter side of the daily grind, and superbly choreographed corporate musical Office recently set its drama, romance and double-crossing to song, an effort that shares the latter’s name favours the darker elements of workplace life. 

In Hong Won-Chan’s directorial debut, earning a paycheque can prove tragic and murderous. After writing the scripts for The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, it is far from surprising that the scribe turned helmer finds horror-like thrills in the interpersonal politics that dictate the time spent in the titular location. Office (O piseu) renders clinical interiors with both familiarity and foreboding, as depicted as cold and glaring in working hours and shadowy when everyone should have left for the day. It favours routine inclusions of office existence — the jarring noise of a printer, the bickering of a meeting, the bathroom backstabbing — that bristle with and mirror the characters’ evident discomfort.

It is from this environment that Kim Byung-guk (Bae Seong-woo, Unconfessional) returns home and vents his frustrations, taking to his wife, young son and mother with a hammer. The following day, his colleagues cope with the aftermath; however his rampage isn’t the only violence within their realm. As Detective Choi Jung-hoon (Park Sung-woong, The Shameless) questions the sales force about their observations, boss Kim Sang-Gyu (Kim Eui-sung, Hill of Freedom) warns intern Lee Mi-rae (Ko A-sung, Snowpiercer) to keep silent about Byung-guk’s obvious unhappiness. It’s a directive she fails to heed, largely driven by her own misery and victimisation by her petty-minded superiors, which is magnified when Da-min (Son Su-hyun) joins the team as her potential replacement.

As the opening act of brutality makes plain, Office doesn’t hold back in its scathing look at the terror and trouble its setting can inspire — and with rampant blood splatter, that’s where the film finds its stronghold. The cause and effect of employment nastiness might build towards an extreme outcome, but the reasoning for such a reaction is explored in compelling scenes of angst, undermining and general untoward behaviour. Both the basis and the response are tersely staged and tensely executed, though the narrative machinations that stem from the latter are less convincing. Once the feature’s caustic commentary is laid bare, carnage takes over, at the expense of the teasing the movie does so successfully in its first half, and with the aid of a series of by-the-numbers occurrences. 

Thankfully, more than her dutiful co-stars, Ko A-sung provides a performance that goes with the flow the filmmaker serves up. As front-loaded, intrigue-wise, as the elongated movie eventually proves, she offers a solid point of focus. Whether playing meek or unravelling with a hint of glee in her eyes, she’s not only the audience’s surrogate in a world that flits between the mundane and the mayhem-laden — she’s adept at conveying the feature’s tone of insidious unease. Sometime her character suffers for it, sometimes she provides it, and there, the statement on seesawing, savage workplace culture Office so vehemently makes is at its boldest and bluntest.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Office (O piseu)
Director: Hong Won-Chan
South Korea, 2015, 111 mins

Adelaide Film Festival
adelaidefilmfestival.org
15-25 October