Leaves and bodies fall in “No Other Choice,” Park Chan-wook’s masterfully devilish satire with a chilling autumnal wind blowing through it.
“Come on, fall,” urges You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as he grills an eel for dinner for his family in the opening moments of Park’s film. He’s eager for the season to start but unprepared for the amount of cyclical collapse — familial, economic, even existential — that Park has in store.
Man-su pronounces the very thing no movie protagonist ever should: “I’ve got it all.” He lives with his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), and two children (Kim Woo Seung, Choi So Yul) in a handsome modernist house in the woods, with two golden retrievers. But almost as soon as he says that, Man-su’s fortunes turn. After 25 years at a paper mill, Man-su is laid off, as are many others, with little fanfare or apology. Desperation begins to set in. He’s forced to sell the home he loves so dearly, including the attached greenhouse where he tends to plants and bonsai trees. They even have to, horror of horrors, cancel Netflix.
Another movie might have sunk with Man-su into bankruptcy and midlife struggle, following his quest to find a new line of work and restart his life. This is not that movie. Man-su, considering his prospects, decides he needs to better his odds of new employment. After posting a fake job listing and comparing all the incoming resumes, he decides he’s about the fifth best option for any new paper mill managerial jobs. He decides to kill the ones with better credentials.
The concept, a Grade-A barnburner of a movie idea, is not new. “No Other Choice,” South Korea’s Oscar submission, is based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 crime novel “The Ax,” which Costa-Gavras also made into a film in 2005. But Park, the filmmaker of such diabolical movies as “Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden” and “Decision to Leave,” is exquisitely suited to the material. This is a director capable of conjuring menacing brutality with nothing but a hallway and hammer.
And in “No Other Choice,” he remains at the peak of his powers, archly and elegantly spinning a yarn about a murderous rampage that accumulates wider and wider reverberations. “Hitchcockian” is a term that often, understandably, finds Park. He is, like Hitch, a seemingly polite and erudite man with a latently dark imagination. But for more than two decades, Park has cut his own bloody, unyieldingly meticulous path in movies that are rarely predictable, very funny and sneakily revelatory.
Much of the delight of “No Other Choice,” which Park co-wrote with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Jahye Lee, isn’t just seeing how Man-su’s scheme goes but how Park frames it. He is probably the preeminent filmmaker of putting wild, outrageous happenings into cleverly formal, eminently stylish imagery. As Man-su bumbles from target to target, each potential murder is a window into another family reckoning with unemployment. The way Man-su spies on them (or worse) adds delicious layers of satire. Relish, especially, the way Park uses reflections and trees.
How “No Other Choice” puts capitalism in the crosshairs, with a handsome house in the center, will no doubt bring to mind another Korean satire: Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite.” Park had been wanting to make his film for almost two decades. Either way, the two movies would make one hell of a destabilizing double feature.
If “Parasite” was the feat of an ensemble, “No Other Choice” belongs to Lee. His Man-su is no killer at heart, and his attempts to become one are as comical as they are Dostoyevskian. The tone is so farcical that the gruesomeness of some of Man-su’s acts come slyly. How many movies have we seen about a parent driven, heroically, to extremes to defend their family? Man-su’s circumstance is frightfully understandable. “Our family is in a war,” he says. To keep them happy — in particular Miri — Man-su thinks whatever it takes is necessary.
But what makes “No Other Choice” brilliant is how it shows that perceived predicament as a ubiquitous mistake of modern life. I won’t spoil the incredible final minutes of Park’s film, but they expand the notion of necessary termination — of a job, of a life — to automation, AI and beyond. The leaves falling in “No Other Choice” aren’t coming back in the spring.
“No Other Choice,” a Neon release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for violence, language and some sexual content. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 139 minutes. Four stars out of four.
