BTS: THE RETURN collates the group’s candid reactions to themselves and their demos as they grind out a comeback album, navigating uncertain waters and existential questions. Music itself, for J-Hope, is existential: “creating music is a way of documenting myself, the version of myself in that moment” — but who are we now? What even is there to write? Should we scrap these tracks? Does this sound too different? Does this sound too similar to what we used to listen to or what we used to make? J-Hope declares, midway-through, the sound “has to be more developed” — Jimin says “no risk, no reward” — V says “we’re chasing” — chasing what? Where? When?

The doc dates Arirang to the 13th century, approximates “ari” meaning “charming, beautiful” and “rang” meaning “longing”, “the longing for the beautiful people we love” — the suggestion to make this folk song and its origins central to the comeback seems to bring RM into contemplation on the subject of time — particularly, as he points out, in the sense of the Greek chronos and kairos, the course of time as a whole as opposed to the auspiciousness of a single moment — for RM, to make themselves out as “folk heroes” whilst affecting the sound of some previous time would be to squander the moment. If music is the art of documenting self, then pastiche is standstill, it’s regression, it’s banal, it’s anti-self, it’s anti-moment. Yet arirang is a longing, by definition a state of otherwise-being, non-being, and as such can be found beyond the boundaries of pastiche. BTS, in their comeback, manage to situate the present in context with history, in the midst of history, in conversation with time, wandering around the monuments of what has already happened, wondering what more there is and what progress is possible.

The chase, thereby, becomes the music, and history the motif — the performances of “SWIM” are recorded in a museum of naval history, the return doc moves through archival footage as the group records their progress on vintage camcorders, the oldschool drum grooves on every track are mixed like ancient spaces which the group resuscitate with their voices. The album’s reception confirms they’ve succeeded in taking risk — certain portions of the audience can’t seem to recognize what’s happening here, the push of the boundaries is a discomfort for them — there’s a certain quality to these tracks, a kháos in the Greek sense, which separates the listener from the orderliness of expectation. There’s no better way to get to know BTS all over again — to see who they are now, the version of themselves in this moment — and yet we arrive at “SWIM,” a track which is at once as BTS as they’ve ever been, yet better than ever. The way to engage with their comeback album is to dive into the ocean in front of us now, not for the ocean’s sake but for our own. And “Body to Body,” perhaps the album’s most absolute anthem, is an incredible surprise and profoundly inspiring — it really was that simple, the “bunch of kids from Korea” really are that good — and whether culture and history have slowed to a standstill, like a dead ocean, or not; for just a moment, it’s of no consequence…

I think it’s time more movies did this — how hard is it to do one thing at a time? To get out of the camera’s way? To let it do exactly what it wants to do? Mr. Joachim Trier definitely knows how to get out of Stellan Skarsgard’s way (or, at least, he knows that he needs to) — the lifelikeness of Skarsgard’s Gustav is so striking and apparent, we barely register the garish scenery, the perfect clouds, the sunset sky, the sand, the ocean and all the rest, nor do we notice how odd it is to hail a horse-drawn chariot pick you up right on the shoreline, practically in the shorebreak.

The garishness of his life is so clearly Gustav’s element. It’s his natural habitat. He will endure leaving it for almost nothing — certainly not his children. But fatherhood requires nothing from the father. The only other father in the movie is hardly there even when he’s present. He’s inattentive, buried in a phone, or asleep in bed, turned away. We’d be forgiven for forgetting he’s even got a few lines. No, fatherhood is something everyone needs except the father. And everyone has to earn their keep to get it out of him, if they can even be bothered to try.

Renate Reinsve’s enigmatic Nora, Gustav’s oldest daughter, is the movie’s engine, feeling everything at the wrong time, feeling nothing when other’s feel something, feeling anger when other’s don’t want her to, feeling in love but only when it’s too late. Acting — playing the role of some other person, anyone but herself — is how she connects to her own life. She seems more herself in moments of spite for Gustav, moments of opposition to him, but even that he can take away.

Gustav says he sees himself when he looks at Nora — not a daughter, but his reflection — and he sees anger. If that’s true, where does it go? Where does hers go, and where does his? On the one hand, Gustav sees himself only in the displacement of others. On the other, his displacement of Nora’s identity is the only way Nora knows it exists. Displacement defines him and it defines her. Nora even has to be reminded of all the ways she had cared for her younger sister, Inga Lilleaas’ Agnes, in their empty childhood — she listens to a story of herself she’d completely forgotten, like she wasn’t even there for it, as remote and removed from her own life as her father had been.

Elle Fanning’s Rachel ultimately steps away from the role Gustav intended for Nora, unable to reconcile the displacement of identity and lack of understanding that make up this family’s default state. Rachel is hardly to blame, Gustav tells her, and we know he’s right. Not even Nora can be Nora — Rachel could never stand in for Gustav’s daughter without disappointing him at every turn. But if Nora could play the role of herself, two things could be true at once — return to self and displacement of self.

It’s a contradiction, but it works, and as such the movie’s final moments are not so much of reconciliation as they are of recognition. Through Nora’s final performance of self, both she and Gustav have finally seen who Nora is — what the father gave up, and what the daughter has been missing, in no small part, because of him. There’s more life to be lived, at least for one of them, and less and less room for anger — that’s where it goes, it’s let go, it has to be. Then the film ends — with the strum of a rom-com guitar?

Despite the movie’s excellence, there’s something Trier can’t seem to do. It’s not in the writing. It’s not in the performances. It’s not in the presentation either — even the chapteresque cut-to-blacks of the edit, which do not come from the screenplay as far as I know, feel like an embrace of the seams of a movie discovered later in the process, little pauses like the turning of a page, like maybe the movie we’re watching, impossibly, is Gustav’s movie which Nora and Agnes are flipping through.

At its best, we can never tell where Sentimental Value’s self reflexivity ends and begins. But Trier’s instincts to get out of the movie’s way, ultimately, betray him. At its worst, Trier never finds the right time to step on the stage himself, to put his hand on the scale, to take out the banal fucking guitar bits at the start and finish and throughout, to tighten the ending, to raise the stakes, to be bold, to finally get in the way of something.

My primary motive in seeing his movie was actually the one and only Hania Rani, Trier’s composer, whose hauntingly inevitable wind-piano-synth original score would be the envy of any project. Yet Trier never lets Rani roam free, he works in very few of her original tracks, returning seemingly to the same one over and over, and skipping around the others. The most salient piece of music on the soundtrack, named for Gustav himself, the movie abandons. I’d been so excited to discover how Rani’s work would be used in the movie, and the answer is it hardly was.

The audience deserves conviction. Trier speaks of the ending in interview with Vanity Fair’s 2025 Cannes Film Festival Coverage, as a meeting between two people so alike and yet so different, where father and daughter are impossible to reconcile, and where that’s okay. Why then do Vanity Fair and others characterize the ending as a reconciliation? It may be because reconciliation is an easy word, and plausible enough. It may be because Trier doesn’t have what it takes to prevent the tonal blurring of his movie, nor the conviction to propel it into the hearts of the audience in the way his cast deserves. At any rate, he’s fortunate that it doesn’t matter, because Reinsve, Skarsgard, Fanning and Lilleaas succeed, and the movie succeeds because of them.

Apparently we’re supposed to like No Other Choice, as the BBC and others would have it, “this year’s Parasite.” Did it get some jumps out of me, yes. Did I laugh, yes.

I laugh at all kinds of things. I can make myself laugh. I don’t need the help of a bleakly obvious, drawn out oh-i’m-meant-to-be-amused-by-that movie, an easy movie that’s all surface, even formally, a movie whose contribution is even easier…

I cringe at the Parasite comparison — these are the only two South Korean movies in existence, famously — but the unfortunate truth is there’s some merit to it. If anything, this is a movie that is trying to be Parasite without being Parasite, terrified that Parasite has said it already, what need is there for this? And yet this is a movie that understands nothing about what Parasite has to contribute, nor can it comprehend Parasite’s achievement in form.

What Parasite accomplishes in one line — “Respect!” — in one character — the housekeeper’s husband hiding from loan sharks underground for years, soon to switch out with Mr. Kim who should have all the makings of an ally — in one image — that bleeding head slamming the lights on in the bunker as Mr. Park enters the house above — what Parasite does so handily, almost offhandedly, No Other Choice takes the whole movie to do, and that’s exactly why it fails, why else…

Well, that and there’s no soul, no heart, no spirit, not like Parasite which is all of those things, and seriousness and brevity and grief and anger and possibility and death — that ending, the embodiment of the capacity of film to bend time for our catharsis, only to rip it from our hands, and the sound of that paper crinkling, inevitable and yet entirely unforeseen.

No Other Choice ends with the closest thing to a heart that it can muster — the sound of their daughter’s gorgeous music — and it’s the part of the film that is genuinely excellent, but also the part we can see from a thousand miles away, the part we know is coming the whole time.

Parasite trusts you to know somewhere deep within yourself exactly what it means. The credits roll on No Other Choice and it’s still force-feeding something to you — should we go? Wait, is it not finished? But you don’t have enough energy to really care if it’s the same spiel or something new. Believe it or not, “if only working people weren’t forced to tear each other apart!” was a thought I’d already had, but thank you for assuming we were all fucking stupid.

More to the point, Parasite is the more interesting film, the more soulful, the more brutal. The first half brings me joy like nothing else, but I can’t watch past when the doorbell rings, I just can’t, it’s torture. With No Other Choice I just can’t be bothered, and honestly maybe no one should. It’s a movie you’ve seen before if you’ve ever done a job interview. It does manage to be more fun than one of those, but that can’t really be enough can it?