Paper cuts are the worst. In “No Other Choice,” a new comic thriller from the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a longtime employee at a pulp manufacturer called Solar Paper, is one of many unceremoniously laid off after Americans take over the company. Months later, with his job search going nowhere, Man-su and his wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), are forced to economize. Mi-ri finds part-time work at a dentist’s office. Their dogs are sent to live with her parents. Furniture is put up for sale, Netflix is cancelled, and their children’s future hangs in the balance. When the family’s beloved house goes on the market, Man-su snaps. This can’t go on. Something must be done.
Judging by the cinema of the downsized, a subgenre as global in its reach as unemployment itself, the possibilities of that “something” are endless. Unlike the shifty protagonists of Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” (2002) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata” (2009), Man-su, at least, does not try to hide his termination from his loved ones. Will he patiently keep seeking out jobs, like the Finnish tram driver cut loose in Aki Kaurismäki’s “Drifting Clouds” (1998)? Or will he vent his fury, like the sacked defense worker in Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down” (1993), who embarks on a brutal rampage through the streets of Los Angeles? This being a movie directed by Park, best known for the extravagant revenge thriller “Oldboy” (2005), it’s no spoiler to reveal that Man-su does not choose peace. He plots to murder a rival, Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon), in hopes of replacing him as line manager at another paper company.
But getting rid of Sun-chul will not be enough. Man-su, wanting an accurate sense of his competition, invents a fake job opportunity and puts out a call for applicants. From the résumés that pour in, he deduces that there are two other highly qualified, recently laid-off paper experts, Gu Bum-mo (Lee Sung-min) and Go Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), who are likelier to be hired for Sun-chul’s position than he is, and who must therefore be eliminated first. Man-su tells himself he has “no other choice,” a phrase that reverberates through the film like a bad mantra: it’s what Solar’s new American overlords say when they kick him to the curb, and it’s also Man-su’s excuse for not trying his hand at another profession. “Paper has fed me for twenty-five years,” he declares. His fellow industry clingers-on feel a similar loyalty—and, with their sudden terminations, a similar betrayal. “No Other Choice,” a blackly comic tale of a breadwinner’s dilemma, is also about a crisis of masculinity: some men will kill to avoid learning another skill set.
Park’s film is the second adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s satirical crime novel “The Ax” (1997), which set its paper-industry murder spree somewhere in the Connecticut area. The first, also titled “The Ax” (2005), was set in France and Belgium and directed, engrossingly, by Costa-Gavras, to whom Park dedicated his own version. Clearly, Westlake’s tale can be productively transplanted to any place that knows the sting of corporate mergers and restructurings. With “No Other Choice,” Park and his co-writers—Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee—have repotted the story in Korean soil, which proves remarkably fertile ground. (You’ll forgive the botanical metaphors: Man-su tends plants as a hobby, with a greenhouse and a garden plot that prove convenient for the disposal of bodies.) Park, ever a fan of pulp fiction, both maintains and updates the story’s paper-industry focus. The effects of increased automation and sustainability-minded practices are duly acknowledged, but so is the ubiquity of paper, which has too many uses—lottery tickets, ice-cream-cone sleeves, and cigarette filters, for starters—to be made obsolete by the digital revolution alone.
Park’s most significant transformation is one of tone. Westlake’s novel unfolds from the point of view of its culprit, who gets a grabber of an opening line: “I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being.” Costa-Gavras’s treatment kept the hard-edged, noirish tone and sociopathic voice-over intact, and the nastier-minded Park of “Oldboy” might have done something similar. More recently, though, in films such as “The Handmaiden” (2016) and “Decision to Leave” (2022), both among his best, he has dialled back the extreme gore that was once his signature. To be sure, there are images in “No Other Choice” that sink into your brain like steel hooks—one shot of a corpse, bound and compacted for ease of burial, has a contortionist horror worthy of Francis Bacon—but there’s more winking mischief than hammer-swinging sadism in Park’s deployment of violence these days. Here, he brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.
The film marks a reunion for Park and Lee Byung-hun, who had his breakout role twenty-five years ago in the director’s political thriller “Joint Security Area,” and who has since become one of Asia’s most popular stars. Best known outside Korea for his work on the series “Squid Game,” he’s a terrifically versatile talent; I’m especially fond of his prince-and-the-pauper double act in the period drama “Masquerade” (2012) and his astonishing performance, in Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” (2011), as a detective driven to extremes almost as deranged as the serial killer he’s hunting. In “No Other Choice,” he plays a murderer whose bursts of ingenuity are often waylaid by bumbling ineptitude. The part gives Lee’s comic gifts and his action chops a frenzied, intensely physical workout, whether Man-su is ducking out of sight, hurling himself down a hill, struggling for a gun, reeling from toothache, or writhing on the ground after a sudden snakebite rattles him at the worst possible moment.
Lee throws himself into all of it with a sad-sack slapstick energy that never undercuts—and, remarkably, even enhances—the psychological acuity of his acting. At fifty-five, he’s borne out the truism that certain heartthrobs, be they Ethan Hawke or Brad Pitt, become more interesting and more versatile with age; Lee, for his part, has also gotten funnier. When Man-su grins and blunders his way through a job interview early on, the glare of the sunlight in his eyes matched by the glares of his interlocutors, it’s a squirmy-funny tour de force. The deliberate exaggeration of both Lee’s performance and Park’s direction is what draws us into a suspension of moral disbelief, a sense of complicity with Man-su’s outrageous scheme. The soundtrack also helps: one of Man-su’s messier murder attempts is accompanied by Cho Yong-pil’s nostalgic 1981 hit “Redpepper Dragonfly,” a song that captures the film’s wild oscillations between comedy and tragedy and signals the first of several shifts into weirder, more poignant territory.
“No Other Choice” is, among other things, an extended meditation on marital discontent, and Man-su’s murder plot, for all the bloody chaos it leaves in its wake, also provides him with a therapeutic dose of perspective. The more he kills, the more he learns about the deep malaise—and, in some cases, eccentricity—of people he had assumed to be happier, more fortunate, and better adjusted than he is. One of the more memorable characters is Ara (a superb Yeom Hye-ran), Bum-mo’s increasingly fed-up, flagrantly unfaithful wife, who, in one harrowing confrontation, winds up both derailing and abetting the killer’s harebrained plot. Man-su and Mi-ri are more happily married, but months of unemployment and multiple homicides take their toll, excavating old resentments and failures, including Man-su’s past struggles with alcoholism. As Mi-ri gets closer to the truth, Son Ye-jin’s performance becomes bracingly unpredictable; she’s both an emotional anchor and a moral wild card.
Park’s work is defined by a freewheeling command of the camera, which he places in service of an ever more dazzling elegance of style. When Park and his director of photography, Kim Woo-hyung, send the camera soaring across the generous expanse of the Yous’ front yard—or plant it, whimsically, at the bottom of an enormous beer stein, the better to watch Man-su’s sobriety drain away—you sense their giddy enthrallment, practically to the point of arousal, by the visual possibilities of their material. This luxuriant, almost decadent virtuosity can feel out of synch with a tale of miserable, penny-pinching extremes. “No Other Choice” has drawn comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019), another bleakly funny, socially conscious Korean thriller in which desperate financial straits precipitate a whirlwind of carnage—but the showmanship of Park’s movie, unlike Bong’s, sometimes outstrips its finesse.
What “No Other Choice” and “Parasite” do have in common, fittingly, is a house to kill for. In Bong’s film, the coveted central location was a modernist masterpiece, all clean, sharp lines and immaculate surfaces. The Yous’ home, the eye-popping standout of Ryu Seong-hie’s production design, is a similarly enormous but earthier, more ramshackle affair. The interiors, dim but comfortable-looking, are full of plants and lumpy leather furniture; the exteriors are a ramshackle marvel, with red-brick arches, a long upper-story deck, and greenery spilling out in every direction. We learn early on that Man-su grew up in this house, and that he proudly bought it back years later and fixed it up himself. No wonder it looks so lived in, so jammed together, so fiercely guarded and loved. ♦
