If you took a shot for every corporate euphemism in No Other Choice, you'd be circling back, going in a different direction, finding your services no longer required, rightsized, downsized, and as plastered as one of the characters.
The very title itself evades responsibility, a phrase used by big companies to hide behind intentional, cold decision-making. In this superb dark comedy-thriller, legendary South Korean director Park Chan-wook delivers a biting social commentary on the brutal job market and its associated hyper-competitiveness that sees candidates out for blood, literally.
Based on Donald E. Westlake's 1997 novel The Ax and written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Don McKellar, the film presents an anti-capitalist fable about workplace politics, where merciless company restructuring drives a desperate family man (Squid Game's Lee Byung-hun) to violence — despite his lack of skills in that department. While not as ultraviolent as Park's lauded Vengeance Trilogy or as seductive as his recent Hitchockian film Decision to Leave, the director hypothesises the fallout of corporate redundancies through this bumbling self-made assassin — one whose inept, maddening decisions will make you consider the morality of it all.
Under pressure to provide, is murdering his way into a job the only option in this economy?
No Other Choice sees a family man scorned in a hyper-competitive, capitalist reality.
In an unhinged, uncomfortably empathetic performance by Lee, the nucleus of the film is Yoo Man-soo, a hardworking, proud, and long-serving employee at specialist paper company Solar Paper. He's saved enough to buy his father's stunning house and provide his wife Mi-ri (Crash Landing on You's Son Ye-jin) and two kids a comfortable, upper-middle-class life, full of cello lessons, outdoor barbecues, and designer goods. It's all captured in a saturated golden light and dynamic cinematography from Kim Woo-hyung — with whom Park worked on The Little Drummer Girl series. But when Man-soo is suddenly fired after decades of company loyalty, bills stack up and pragmatic Mi-ri declares their need to adjust — and it's not just creature comforts that are sent packing but actual creatures too, including their pair of adorable, obedient golden retrievers.
No corporate mindfulness workshop could assuage Man-soo's fears of eternal unemployment and the societal shame of it all. Meanwhile, Mi-ri gets her own job at a dentist's office, where the handsomeness of her new boss fuels Man-soo's jealousy and determination to reclaim his breadwinning pride.
Suddenly, the perfect opportunity (or any opportunity at all) appears on the horizon at the rival Moon Paper, with Man-soo facing an intimidating ocean of potential candidates and AI-powered replacements. Not seeing a snowball's chance in hell of getting the position, he writes a shortlist of candidates (Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min) that could beat him to the job, intending to eliminate them — for good. That means luring them into applying for jobs at his fake company and killing his way back into employability, one by one.
Park Chan-wook subverts his signature vengeance mode to scrutinise morality and responsibility.
The quest for vengeance and self-satisfaction runs rivers of blood throughout Park's work, with revenge fueling his lauded 2000s triptych Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. But where the protagonists of the Vengeance Trilogy had a particular set of skills and life-defining scores to settle, Man-soo of No Other Choice embodies both amateur killer-to-be and believer of himself as a Good Person.
As the title suggests, Park's film is a hard lesson in individualist finger-pointing and evasive corporate euphemisms that sees its protagonist deflect any form of responsibility for his actions. Man-soo believes he has, after all, exhausted all options. Here, as in Park's line of retaliatory narratives, No Other Choice explores moral and ethical boundaries; Man-soo believes his behaviour is justified for the benefit of his family and his own sense of pride as provider.
With a spectacularly physical performance of pure desperation from Lee, Yoo Man-soo flails his way through violent encounters, one of which is darkly comedic (and stolen by the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran as a target candidate's wife), another gruesome and calculated. It's these scenes that see Park in glorious contained chaos mode, the master of escalating, brutal pandemonium within one set-piece. Park consistently shows Man-soo on the precipice of violence: The family man standing on the edge of an apartment roof holding a heavy pot plant above a competitor perfectly encapsulates the film's ongoing "Will he actually do it?" tension. Here, Park deploys Kim's stylised cinematography and bold editing by Kim Sang-bum to heighten the more operatic elements of the story.
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As a viewer, we're simultaneously rooting for Man-soo and unnerved by his capacity for calculated manipulation and murder. No Other Choice poses the question: Would you kill for the life you want? In fact, the film doesn't even ask it, instead presenting a man believing himself forced into making such a decision due to cold, hard corporate strategy. It's out of his hands. It's a top-down decision. When you really consider it, Man-soo's simply delivering on blue sky thinking.
No Other Choice was reviewed out of BFI London Film Festival. The film will hit select cinemas in late December before a broad release in January.