Korean pop music blasts over a miscalculated murder scene involving a screaming match, baking gloves and a North Korea-issued revolver in Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, premiering at this year’s London Film Festival. It’s just one of the heightened comic set-pieces that thrills in this hyper-resonant drama.
In 2019, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite gave us the Park family’s modern, minimalistic house as the setting for a sharp, anti-capitalist satire, and in No Other Choice, we’re treated to a similarly impressive feat of production design. The work of Korean production designer, Ryu Seong-hie, a frequent collaborator of Chan-wook’s, another gorgeous modern home sets the scene for the delirious social satire that’s to come.
The residents are You Man-su (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), his wife, Miri (Son Yej-in), their two children and their two golden labradors. Man-su is barbecuing eel in their garden, a forest-surrounded idyll, before the happy family embrace for a moment in the late afternoon sunshine – “I’ve got it all”, Man-su sighs. Everything is perfect, but this is a Park Chan-wook film and very few of the 139 minutes are up yet. Things will spiral from here.
Sure enough, the eel, a luxurious gift from the new American owners of his company, was not a token of gratitude but of the axe. To Man-su’s shock, he is to be unceremoniously fired from his managerial job at a paper mill after 25 years in the business. Adrift in a corporate landscape marching towards the era of AI, Man-su tries it all – affirmations of “I feel great!” in group therapy sessions, painful interviews where sunlight reflects right into his eyes from an opposite office building, even a lowly retail job. Meanwhile, his doting but pragmatic wife assesses the financial cuts they must make to navigate their new life without Man-su as the breadwinner: no more tennis lessons, no more dogs and, to the horror of their son, no more Netflix.
The house that Chan-wook’s camera so elegantly moves over – hard-earned by Man-su and what we later find out is his childhood home – also has to go. Additionally threatened by the young, handsome dentist at his wife’s new job and burdened by the ever-growing shame that plagues the redundant salaryman (Kiyoshi Kurosawa captured this depressingly well in his 2008 familial drama Tokyo Sonata), Man-su turns to increasingly desperate measures. Since a career pivot is out of the question and the paper industry’s job market is shrinking, he has “no other choice” but to eliminate his competition – literally.
An action thriller this is not, though. Man-su is played endearingly by the great leading man that is Lee Byung-Hun as he blunders his way through kills in hilariously amateurish fashion – he’s really, really bad at this whole murder gig. The thrill instead comes from the utter absurdity we’re witness to, evidently the consequences of a capitalist society that has twisted its resident’s own sense of self-worth beyond reason.
Park Chan-wook’s follow-up to Decision to Leave (2022) may be a South Korea-set adaptation of an American book (1997’s The Ax by Donald E. Westlake), but its satire points fingers at capitalist societies the world-over. No Other Choice is a painfully relevant portrait of fragile masculinity and corporate ruthlessness in our anxious world. Park Chan-wook’s crucial, dark humour is perhaps at its most brilliantly twisted best here in a film that lays bare the stupid lengths we’ll go to stay cogs in the corporate (paper) mill.
