There’s a galaxy-brained clip from Park Chan-wook’s 2013 gothic melodrama Stoker that goes viral on Twitter every few months. It’s a close-up shot of a woman’s hair being combed, the strands seamlessly transforming into a bird’s eye view of a dense woodland. In The Sympathizer, the new seven-part miniseries created by Park and Canadian writer Don McKellar, there are maybe a half-dozen transitions of comparable strangeness and ingenuity within the first few episodes. Shots that make you sit forward and think, just what am I watching? To be clear, that’s a good thing.
Adapted from the Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name by Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer is set in the aftermath of the US war in Vietnam. At its centre is The Captain (Hoa Xuande), an official within the American-backed police force, who is secretly feeding information to the communist Viet Cong. After Saigon falls, he flees to the US as a refugee, where he continues his serpentine double life under the nose of the paranoid General (Toan Le). With echoes of the German spy thriller Deutschland 83, this is a story of internal contradiction, of cultural identities at war with themselves.
