Review: No Other Choice

Director:  Park Chan-wook

Stars:  Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Lee Sung-min

(No) thanks to the catastrophic push from all quarters that we accept faulty new automaton AI overlords, the global job market has gone from dismal to deadly. Park Chan-wook’s loose updating of Donald E. Westlake’s late ’90s novel “The Ax” sees the South Korean maestro further flexing his satirical skills, taking aim at the capitalist system that instills this idea that partaking in it’s rat-race is our only option. That our behaviour has been so blithely conditioned that we believe, fully, that there’s No Other Choice.

Park’s Pavlov dog is family patriarch and former Pulp Man of the Year, Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a lifer in the paper industry who’s worked his way to prideful middle management. It’s afforded him the flexibility to live a rather affable life. But when new American owners start a ruthless downsizing, Yoo is cast aside. After 25 years in the game, Yoo is blinkered to the idea that he begin anew in some other sector. Viewing his stiff competition in a niche market, Yoo starts plotting some downsizing of his own; offing the candidates that might beat him to the next coveted job opening.

The title is uttered throughout the film in different contexts, but returns us to this notion of narrowed thinking. Yoo is victim of a global crisis, and No Other Choice suggests true universality to Westlake’s source text. That there’s always some form of financial downturn, recession or ruthless ‘streamlining’ looming over us. That the system uses these threats to corner and cower us into submission. But Yoo is also a victim of his own limited view. If he put half as much effort into his own interview prep as he does his half-baked murder plots, he’d risk far less overall.

Lee is superb as Yoo, putting forth a comedic turn that’s as fleet of foot as classic Keaton, Chaplin or even Gene Kelly. There’s a lot of musicality to his movement. He deftly matches the pitch of Park’s satire, close to (and in this viewer’s mind, sharper than) Bong Joon-ho’s similarly scathing social critique Parasite. And like all great comedic bits, we’re presented a set-up of Three. Three unsuspecting candidates to kill. Lee Sung-min’s similarly unemployed wretch Gu Bum-mo; Cha Seung-won’s sympathetic shoe salesman Ko Si-jo; and Park Hee-soon’s successful influencer Choi Seon-chul. Each presents a different moral conundrum for Yoo to overcome, as well as wildly differing circumstances for his anxious and amateurish plans.

At risk is his family life and home; a gorgeous (and somewhat gothic) property that goes back generations, which Yoo toiled to bring back into his possession, now at risk of foreclosure. Here all manner of further microdramas accumulate. Yoo’s wife Lee Miri (a wonderful Son Ye-jin) grows suspicious of her husband’s late night activities; teenage son from her first marriage, Si-one (Kim Woo-seung), commits petty theft to bolster the family revenue; and child cello prodigy Ri-one (Choi So-yul) requires more expensive lessons if her only avenue of expression is to be nurtured. No Other Choice sets a number of plates spinning, but the method through which Park keeps them all apace ensures this sprawling story never lacks for momentum.

Park has long been a master showman with a penchant for the darkly comic. Over the course of the century so far he has honed these skills, from the showboating provocations of his Vengeance Trilogy to a slightly more mannered confidence in later years. To a degree No Other Choice is a return to the more scabrous misanthropy of his earlier work (it also revisits Oldboy‘s penchant for DIY dentistry…). It’s certainly more openly comic than his recent Hitchcockian effort, the deliciously good Decision to Leave. As with that film, Park displays a visual humour that is almost unmatched. While there are bravura camera moves and outre moments that evidence the filmmaker’s technical prowess, these function with the intentions of the movie. In short, such efforts – while pointedly stylised – contain less ego than in his earlier years. With nothing left to prove, Park is all about enhancing the work in front of him these days.

The results are a feast for the eyes, be it showing off a canny consideration of geography as Yoo bumbles his way toward another potential victim, or a simple cross-fade that brings with it thematically strong insinuations. I particularly enjoyed one that merged an elevated shot of the family home with a burgeoning night barbecue, giving the brief impression that the prized Yoo homestead was on fire.

No Other Choice also sticks a particularly sardonic landing, ending on the kind of ‘win’ that seems open to misinterpretation. Yoo gains access to that select group of criminally minded male anti-heroes for whom viewers are invited to root, whose prize is, ultimately, a callous mockery of the toll involved in getting there. The ending mocks AI and increased automation, but also presents it chillingly, threateningly, as folly with the potential for real danger. To human life, to nature and the planet itself. Park sends us back out in the world grateful for the chance to chuckle at our misfortunes, but also incredibly uneasy that the end we’re making for ourselves is one we grimly deserve.

Somehow, for all it’s schadenfreude, mockery and pessimism, No Other Choice doesn’t lack for a beating heart. It’s there in the family home, an oft-ignored habitat of warmth and solidarity that Yoo nearly loses not through financial peril, but his own misguided distraction. For all the chaotic exploits happening in every direction, Park manages to carve out time to make the film’s humanity matter, be it a longing look across a dance floor, a clinch by a closet, or the simple sound of a young cellist teasing out some doleful melody.

With these elements smartly acting as counterweight to Yoo’s cacophonous criminal escapades, Park ensures he’s scored another populist masterwork. To this viewer, quite possibly his best to date.