It’s hold my hands up and confess time – aside from the obvious (Oldboy), I’m not particularly well versed in the spellbinding career of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. Not only have I not cast an appraising eye over the other entries in his list of movies, but I never even completed the remaining two titles in his highly lauded Vengence Trilogy, Sympathy For Mr. Vengence and Lady Vengence.
In a massive attempt to rectify my glaring inadequacies (and to avoid being locked in a room for fifteen years), I made it a major point to catch Park’s latest release, No Other Choice, a searing black comedy that delivers a caustic takedown of the lengths we’ll go to preserve our place in society while under the thumb of corporate whims. However, while Oldboy had prepared me for how Park’s works can alternate between being unflinching brutal and beautifully whimsical (often in the same scene), I wasn’t prepared for how funny the director could also be. Prepare yourself for a ratrace where extermination is the name of the game.
Man-su has been great at his job at papermaking company Solar Paper for well into 25 years and not only has he won awards for his craft, but it’s allowed to buy and fix up hid childhood home and raise a family with his wife Mi-ri. However, due to some corporate downsizing after an American buy out, Man-su suddenly finds himself suddenly without a job so fast, it doesn’t even register at first, but as unemployment looms, he vows to be back in the papermaking game within three months. However, vows are all very well and good, but after numerous failed interviews his family has been blitzed with spending cuts. Mi-ri has given up her tennis lessons and has taken a job as a dental assistant, but their young, neurodivergent, cello prodigy daughter, Ri-one gets ever more antisocial after the family is forced to give their beloved dogs away to their parents. Even Man-su’s stepson, Si-one, has to accept that Netflix is now a no-no, but as the fact that they’re going to have to sell the family home takes its toll, a humiliating encounter with Seon-chul, the manager of Moon Paper, gives the fraying patriarch a disturbing idea.
Realising that murdering Seon-chul and then applying for his job may ultimately be useless if there’s others out there that are better qualified, Man-su hatches a plot which involves him placing a fake work ad and pouring over the applicants to see who would have a better chance of scoring the position over him. From there, he now has a hit list of two victims to eliminate before he targets Seon-chul – but as desperate as he is, even if he can literally pull the trigger on his audacious plan, he’s never committed cold blooded murder before. How on earth is this papermaker going to pull off three murders, dispose of the bodies and avoid suspicion in order to desperately preserve his way of life?
With Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, South Korean once again established itself at the forefront of razor sharp black comedies that viciously stick a lance the flank of modern society and then spitefully breaks it off and it’s altogether fitting that Park Chan-wook gratefully takes that baton and sprints off into the distance with it with No Other Choice. Offering up the (hopefully exaggerated) notion that we’re so plugged into the lives we’ve built around ourselves and our families, when a massive change for the worse rears it’s unwanted head, we’d do literally anything to keep everything we’ve accumulated. Having experienced redundancy (twice actually), I know what it feels like to have your entire world yanked out from under you as the need to provide for you and yours becomes an obsessive rush, but while I’ve never hatched a crafty murder plot to up my chances of employment, there’s still something wonderfully worrying about how relatable Park Chan-wook makes this all sound.
Employing tonal shifts so harsh you may have to see a chiropractor for whiplash, the director puts us in Man-su’s panicked mindset, made all the more strenuous by a glaring toothache he’s experiencing and the added pressure of unemployment and the fact that he’s plotting to murder a clutch of innocent people for his own even starts to see him doubting the fidelity of his wife. While some may find Park’s fractured style a bit too jarring to cling to, what can’t be discounted is the fact that somehow the director has managed to craft a film that never loses sight of its humanity when lesser talents could have fallen into cruel, dehumanising slapstick. So detailed is the film, not only does it take the time to settle into Man-su’s intricate plots, but it makes sure we spend important time with all of the characters, including the victims, which leads to a long, but surprisingly nimble, runtime.
Of course, if it sounds that a film about a desperate guy killing other, similarly desperate men in the same situation in order to get a leg up on life sounds like it’s going to be unrelentingly grim, we get a surprisingly laugh-out-loud experience from the man who once gave us Oldboy’s twisted reckoning. For example, witness the farcical mess of the first attempt that sees Man-su attempt to assasinate the first, boozy, obstacle in his way only to constantly be tripped up by the crumbling relationship the man has with his wife; or the hypnotically gruesome method our lead comes up with to compact a body down for optimum burial. Even the deaths themselves each contain some weird, puzzle box sensibilities about them, such as Man-su yanking of a succession of oven gloves to reveal a gun cling-filmed to his fist, the water dripping from a raised flowerpot doubling as a cartoonish amount of sweat, or the truly bizarre lengths he goes to to try and fake a fatality caused by choking on vomit – but at no point does Park lose focus on what’s important – the steady erosion of humanity required to fund the hopes and dreams of your loved ones.
The cast is magnificent, with Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun somehow manages to believably straddle the nexus point between cold killer, bumbling clown and loving family as his past vices threaten to consume him along with his murder-spree but amazingly never loses empathy and Son Ye-jin also does wonders in the wife role that, in lesser hands, would be in danger of becoming throwaway. In fact, her gradual, growing suspicions about what her husband may be up to ends up being just as gripping as the actual murders and who else but Park Chan-wook would conceive of marriage problems being harshly addressed while the couple in question are dressed as Pocahontas and John Smith?
While Park’s directorial choices may not be for everyone expecting a more straight-forward black comedy, the fact that the director never loses sight of the humanity in literally every single character is nothing short of remarkable. Even more impressive is that he manages to balance genuine pathos with broad, chaotic farce while avoiding turning any of the players into living cartoons and in an ever more cruel world, watching this film just has to be done – there is no other choice…
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