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IN TIME for the culmination of spooky season, horror and crime drama series are filling online streaming platforms. Here is a quick rundown of what you can catch this Halloween if getting shivers down your spine is your thing.

NETFLIX
From suspense-filled thrillers to natural and supernatural horror, there’s a lot to choose from on Netflix. There is True Haunting, an American docufiction series that looks into hauntings using immersive reenactments and interviews. With James Wan as one of its executive producers, the five episodes look into two tales of mysterious hauntings.

Meanwhile, the Italian true crime limited series The Monster of Florence delves into the case of a serial killer in 1960s Italy who targeted couples parked in lovers’ lanes. Based on a notorious true story, the four-episode limited series was directed by Stefano Sollima.

Other interesting titles are Nightmares of Nature, an animal documentary series that centers on the horrific beauty of nature from the perspective of prey; and Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology of American serial killers, this time following the 1950s murderer Ed Gein.

HBO MAX
Another series about a real-life serial killer, this time on HBO Max, is Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. The miniseries first premiered on Peacock and dramatizes the life of Gacy who murdered young men and boys in the 1970s.

Then there’s the HBO original crime drama Task, created by Brad Ingelsby, which stars Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent investigating violent robberies in stash houses. The seven-episode miniseries is a bleak and horrific look at the reality of crime.

For a more fun yet appropriately themed watch, check out the 11^th season of Halloween Baking Championship, an entertaining battle between some of America’s top bakers who are seeking to create the spookiest treats and desserts.

DISNEY+
Disney+ has a lineup of horror and crime series fresh from Hulu. Murdaugh: Death in the Family is a five-episode miniseries that investigates a man accused of the murders of his wife and son. The platform also has the biographical miniseries The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true story that centers on an American college student studying in Italy who is wrongfully convicted of murder.

Riffing off the popularity of true crime these days, Hulu is also showing the fifth and latest season of the fictional comedy-drama Only Murders in the Building. The show is a must-watch, about a trio of neighbors (played by Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) who have a shared interest in true crime podcasts and become friends while investigating a series of murders in their apartment building.

PRIME VIDEO
Over on Prime Video, the UK-set horror-thriller series Lazarus, created by Harlan Coben and Danny Brocklehurst, follows a forensic psychiatrist who looks into cold case murders after coming home for the death of his father. Meanwhile, the platform’s satirical superhero series Gen V, a spinoff of the famed and equally violent hit The Boys, has a new season.

Another fun watch is the brand-new second season of Hazbin Hotel, an adult animated musical series about Charlie Morningstar, the crown princess of Hell.

LIONSGATE PLAY
For older titles that aren’t necessarily spooky, but still horrific in their own, realistic way, Lionsgate Play has some gems worth revisiting. The 2018 UK drama miniseries A Very English Scandal has Hugh Grant play a charming and charismatic politician hiding a dangerously cruel interior.

Finally, there’s Mr. Robot, a show that ran from 2015 to 2019, starring Rami Malek as a cybersecurity engineer and vigilante hacker who exposes the scary global chaos of a world that is reliant on the internet. — Brontë H. Lacsamana

By Brontë H. Lacsamana, Reporter

Movie Review
No Other Choice
Directed by Park Chan-wook
MTRCB Rating: R-13

GREED and self-preservation can devolve into carnage, be it in a metaphorical sense as men chase the necessity of capital, or in a literal sense as they seek to actually kill.

This movie takes us through that endless rat race.

No Other Choice follows veteran paper mill manager Yoo Man-soo (played by Squid Game antagonist Lee Byung-hun), who is laid off and humiliated by a ruthless job market. As he gets more and more desperate to reclaim his dignity and continue providing a comfortable lifestyle for his family, he gradually resorts to shocking acts of violence.

At the heart of this thriller is Lee’s riveting performance as a man who is fully subsumed by the endless climb to a stable career. Director Park Chan-wook, known for his creative and sometimes even playfully manic visual style, depicts this character’s wins bleakly as if they were losses. This film is the type where you wouldn’t know whether to laugh, feel sad, or gape at the screen in anguish or horror. Lee is perfectly cast, able to nail this precarious balance between humor and cruelty.

Ultimately, Park’s latest film does have echoes of the devilish heartbreak in Decision to Leave, the elaborate blossoming in The Handmaiden, and the brutal horseplay in Oldboy, but it stands on a unique platform of its own, as a singularly cutthroat capitalist tragedy. No Other Choice lives and breathes the exasperation of a man who refuses all other choices presented to him to keep climbing the ladder he is on, even as the journey disfigures him into something unrecognizable.

Son Ye-jin as his beautiful and lively yet dutifully loyal wife, Lee Mi-ri, also stuns. She conveys the full spectrum of emotion of a woman who will stand firm with the man she has married, even as he crosses the point of no return. In the hands of Park, both her and Lee’s acting talents shine.

Park Chan-wook doesn’t disappoint, though his usual formal playfulness is reeled in, even somewhat streamlined here to serve the story — like a match-cut transition from a family hug to water rushing down a drain, a cross-dissolve imposition of a man plotting over a bonfire and his wife searching for clues to his strange behavior — not as flashy as stuff from his previous work, but effective all the same.

The details are impeccable, reflected by the physical and mental tough love that goes into the characters’ care for plants, and the kinds of forests that are built on the extremes of this brutal nature. It’s no wonder this is South Korea’s official entry to the 98^th Academy Awards.

Fans of director Park’s work will be impressed by how No Other Choice juxtaposes regular family struggles with the amoral actions that individuals have to make to prosper in a world of corporate greed. Perhaps the most striking thing about this film is how bleak and empty the successful moments feel, despite the main character’s visible triumph after each step of his elaborate scheme.

In the beginning, Min-soo talks a big game about justice and togetherness and the necessity of manual labor in their line of work. The ending, without spoiling, puts him in the largest and emptiest of spaces, thanks to the advancements of AI that have broken down the very principles he used to espouse.

This is about a man losing his soul, bit by bit, as he learns to adapt to the systemic cruelty that seeks to snuff him out, until he eventually regurgitates the same phrase that the higher-ups down to the middlemen have said to him time and again: that he simply has no other choice.

No Other Choice is now showing in Philippine cinemas nationwide.