Fans of Park Chan-wook dropped the marmalade – or possibly the kimchi – when they heard he was to direct the latest BBC John Le Carré adaptation, The Little Drummer Girl.
The second of those, Oldboy, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 and announced Park to the world.
Over six episodes of The Little Drummer Girl, Park has all the space he could want to set up our expectations and then confound them.
Unlike with Tarantino, however, the violence in Park’s films is never for its own sake, or for pure entertainment.