With thousands of Americans finding themselves suddenly jobless thanks to the current Presidential Administration, Park Chan-wook’s deliciously twisted No Other Choice hits especially hard. As usual, Chan-wook effortlessly melds shocking violence with black humor while examining what masculinity is to a man without work, a man who can no longer be the breadwinner for his family. It’s not unlike recent Best Picture winner Parasite, from the filmmaker’s South Korean contemporary Bong Joon-ho. What’s crazy is how rational the irrational becomes in a world of such corporate disdain for the common worker, so much so that you can almost relate when a disgruntled employee starts stacking up the body count to get back into the job market.
Based on Donald E. Westlake’s horror satire The Ax, No Other Choice stars Squid Game‘s Lee Byung-hun as You Man-su. Man-su has everything, as he exclaims early on while grilling some eel sent to him by the new American owners of the paper company he’s worked for over 25 years. He’s got a beautiful wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), her teen son from an earlier marriage, and their young daughter, a cello prodigy who only speaks to echo others. There are also the two beloved dogs. They all live in Man-su’s childhood home, which he worked hard to buy back and restore. It is a perfect life. “I’ve got it all”, he says. We know he’s doomed right from the start.
However, those eels weren’t exactly a gift. Language barriers and all, they were actually part of a cold severance package as Man-su is one of the terminated. He doesn’t even realize it, and had planned to go in and defend the jobs of his colleagues who, like him, have built their lives on paper. It sounds ridiculous even as he says it. Paper, for all of its uses, is thin and easily torn apart. Not much of a foundation. Emasculated, Man-su is determined to find a new job in the paper industry within three months, but can’t do it. So he comes up with an ingenious plot to create a fake paper business to attract all of his competition, then murder them one by one until he’s all that is left for the real companies to hire.
What’s clever about No Other Choice is that you think it’s going to be one thing, a silly dark comedy in which Man-su just slaughters his way to the top, but it turns out to be quite more than that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still riotously funny with some death scenes staged in such a way that you’ll never forget them. In Man-su’s first botched murder attempt, he ends up in a three-way brawl for a gun, during which the music is blaring so loud that you can’t hear the marital dispute raging during the fracas. It quickly goes from murder to madcap chase scene, highlighting Chan-wook’s distinct comedic visual flair.
No Other Choice fleshes out Man-su’s anxiety with a series of funny subplots and marital mishaps. There are tennis and cello lessons to pay for, Man-su’s raging toothache, a past trauma involving his father and a pig farm, his wife’s possible infidelity with her much-younger boss, and so much more. All of these aspects mix with the bloody, gruesome hijinks that make No Other Choice feel surprisingly lived-in, despite how unreal the killing spree gets. Throughout, everyone has an excuse as to why they had “no other choice” but to do what they’ve done. The Americans say they have no other choice but to fire workers, Man-su says he had no other choice but to turn to murder because he had no other choice but to work in paper. It’s all bullshit, of course. There’s always the choice to do the right thing. But then what fun would that be?
NEON will release No Other Choice later this year.
