Recruiters hate this one weird trick.
Park Chan-wook has long been obsessed with the mechanics of the breaking point and in No Other Choice, he finally achieves his long-held ambition of adapting Donald E Westlake’s novel “The Ax”, finding that threshold in the sterile, terrifyingly polite middle-management cull of a Korean paper mill.
The film follows Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran paper industry expert who finds his twenty-five-year career shredded by an indifferent American corporate restructuring. Rather than succumbing to the quiet decay and decline of the long-term unemployed, Man-su decides that the only logical way to secure a new position is to physically eliminate his better-qualified rivals.
Conceptually, No Other Choice invokes a certain cartoonish glee, and in other hands could easily have become something very different. Park, though, maintains a persistent, awkward weight to proceedings. There’s no Tarantino-esque pop culture macerated massacre here, nor the predatory procedural plotting of serial killer here. Lee Byung-hun, shed of the cool-blooded charisma often seen in his action roles, plays Man-su with a sweaty desperation that remains unnervingly relatable, if not exactly likeable. He is a man who loves his family – his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), his teenage stepson, and his cello-prodigy daughter – with a determination that ossifies into a singular, murderous focus on “providing”. Park captures this descent with his usual surgical precision, though the film exchanges the silkiness of Decision to Leave for an antic, sometimes exhaustingly clumsy energy that reflects the protagonist’s own crumbling psyche.
No Other Choice’s momentum is fuelled by a series of stakeouts and botched hits that play like a grim inversion of an Ealing caper. Man-su’s methodology, placing a fake recruitment ad to lure out his competition, brings him into the orbits of men like Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) and Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won). These aren’t faceless villains; they are mirrors of Man-su himself, men whose only crime is their competence in a market that no longer values it. The sequence involving Beom-mo’s wife, A-ra (Yeom Hye-ran), and a struggle over a Vietnam-era handgun, is a highlight of tonal tightrope-walking, layering pitch-black slapstick over genuine dread.
No Other Choice is immaculately and imaginatively staged. The cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung shifts from the oversaturated, storybook perfection of Man-su’s domestic life to the cold, dehumanising gleam of modern industrial architecture, blending the transitions in increasingly confusing fashion. The use of music is particularly pointed; while the family’s daughter plays a distant, mathematical cello, the soundtrack is peppered with analogue soul and Korean ballads that suggest a yearning for a more human, and humane era of labour. These elements help to mitigate the indulgences in a screenplay that occasionally threatens to meander too far into family subplots involving dental assistants and teenage shoplifting.
While the film lacks the clockwork tightness of Park’s absolute finest work, it is a formidable entry in the “capitalism-is-a-death-cult” subgenre and while it’s destined, inevitably, to be compared to Parasite, it’s something quite different. It asks us to invest in a man who is making the most monstrous decisions imaginable for the most mundane of reasons, and Lee Byung-hun’s performance ensures that investment is rarely easy but always compelling. No Other Choice is a work of jagged, uncomfortable brilliance that suggests the most dangerous thing in the world isn’t a man with a vendetta, but a man with a mortgage and bills to pay.
