There’s no coming out of a Park Chan Wook film with your hands clean. It’s why the infamous twist at the end of his revenge thriller Oldboy felt so shocking – in the implication of shared guilt, when all we did was witness and, perhaps, find some empathy in another’s torment. His new black comedy, No Other Choice, feels particularly tacky (in the adhesive sense), as if it might require a lint roller to finally scrape off its effect on us.
Perhaps it’s because it concerns itself with a near-universal sin: participation in the gladiatorial arena that is the job market. As if to underline the point, Park’s film adapts a 1997 American novel, The Ax by Donald Westlake, already adapted in 2005 by Greek-French director Costa-Gavras (to whom the film is dedicated).
