Leaves and bodies fall in “No Other Choice”. Park Chan Wook masterfully diabolical satire, permeated with a chilling autumn wind.
“Come on, fall,” Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) urges as he grills eel for dinner for his family in the opening moments of Park’s film. He's looking forward to the start of the season, but he's not prepared for the massive cyclical collapse—familial, economic, even existential—that Park is preparing.
Man Soo says something no movie protagonist should ever say: “I have everything.” He lives with his wife Miri (Song Ye-jin) and two children (Kim Woo-seung, Choi So-yul) in a beautiful modernist house in the woods with two golden retrievers. But almost as soon as he says this, Man Soo's fate changes. After 25 years of working at a paper mill, Man Soo is fired, like many others, without much fanfare or apology. Despair begins to set in. He is forced to sell the home he loves so much, including the attached greenhouse where he cares for his plants and bonsai trees. They even had to, horror of horrors, cancel Netflix.
Another Man Soo movie could have resulted in bankruptcy and midlife struggles as he strives to find a new field and start his life anew. This is not that movie. Man-soo, assessing his prospects, decides that he needs to improve his chances of getting a new job. After posting a fake job listing and comparing all the incoming resumes, he decides that he is the fifth best option for any new management position at a paper mill. He decides to kill those with more power.
This concept, which is a top-notch movie idea, is not new. No Other Choice, South Korea's Oscar contender, is based on Donald Westlake's 1997 crime novel Hatchet, which Costa-Gavras also adapted into a 2005 film. But Park, director of such diabolical films as Oldboy, The Handmaiden and Deciding to Quit, is perfect for this material. This is a director capable of causing menacing cruelty with just one corridor and hammer.
And on “No Other Choice” he remains at the peak of his powers, slyly and elegantly weaving a tale of murderous rampage that gains wider and wider resonance. “Hitchcock” is a term that Park understandably comes up with a lot. He, like Hitch, is a seemingly polite and erudite man with a hidden dark imagination. But for more than two decades, Park has forged his bloody, relentlessly meticulous path in films that are rarely predictable, wildly funny and quietly revelatory.
Much of the fun of “No Other Choice,” which Park co-wrote with Lee Kyung-mi, Don McKellar and Jahae Lee, lies not only in how Man-soo’s scheme works, but also in the way Park frames it. He is arguably an outstanding director with a knack for putting wild, outrageous events into cleverly formal and extremely stylish imagery. As Man-soo rushes from target to target, each potential murder becomes a window into another family struggling with unemployment. The way Man-soo spies on them (or worse) adds delightful layers of satire. You'll especially love how Park uses reflections and trees.
The way No Other Choice puts capitalism in the crosshairs with a beautiful house at its center will certainly be reminiscent of another Korean satire: “Parasite” by Bong Joon Ho. Park has been wanting to make his film for almost two decades. Either way, these two films would make one hell of a destabilizing double feature.
If “Parasite” was an ensemble feat, “No Other Choice” belongs to Lee. His Man-su is not a killer at heart, and his attempts to become one are as comical as they are Dostoevsky. The tone is so farcical that the horror of some of Man-soo's actions comes off as clever. How many movies have we seen about parents heroically going to extremes to protect their family? Man-soo's circumstances are terribly clear. “Our family is at war,” he says. To make them happy, especially Miri, Man-soo believes that whatever is needed is necessary.
But what makes Another Choice brilliant is that it shows how the predicament is perceived as a pervasive failure of modern life. I won't spoil the incredible final minutes of Park's film, but they expand the concept of necessary closure—work, life—to automation, artificial intelligence, and beyond. The leaves that fall in “No Other Choice” will not return 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. Duration: 139 minutes. Four stars out of four.
