The hero of Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is so ground down by circumstance, so consumed by a need to regain his social and economic footing, that he lashes out like an animal backed into a corner. That phrase — “no other choice” — turns up in dialogue throughout the movie, and always as a means of justifying actions that wound someone else. We hear it so often that it develops into a sick mantra: Sure, you might be desperate, but is cold-blooded murder really the only choice?
Things are good at first. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a family man and devoted employee at an artisan paper company. He has a supportive wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), two stepchildren, a couple golden retrievers and a beautifully rustic house. Because they’re a picture-perfect family in a film by Park, we know they won’t stay that way for long.
And they don’t. Man-su is laid off when the company is acquired by an American conglomerate. He’s humiliated, debased, literally groveling for work. First go the creature comforts, like the Netflix account, and his daughter’s cello lessons. Then it’s one of their cars, then the dogs. Miri goes back to work, and the house goes on the market.
After a year at a lifeless retail job, Man-su hears that the most successful paper company in Korea is hiring for a management position. So he does what anyone would do: devises an elaborate plot to take out his toughest competition one by one, making him the prime candidate by default. This results in a lot of harebrained violence, both shocking and funny. Man-su is sloppy, impulsive and unprepared for surprises, but he becomes more adroit as he sinks deeper and deeper.
This premise is taken from a Donald Westlake novel called The Ax, and Park has twisted it like a bonsai tree into a blunt satire about South Korean business culture and how the working class, when oppressed by the wealthy, eats itself alive. Park is known for revenge thrillers like Oldboy and The Handmaiden, and No Other Choice is about a certain form of vengeance: Man-su is attacking a system, a culture, a social currency — but the casualties are other people in the same boat as him.
It’s a movie of devious narrative efficiency, and the screenplay is brilliant in how it creates new threads and then gleefully and ingeniously ties them up. But it also makes time for a lot of strange subplots, including the quietly sad existences of other laid-off businessmen and even a ballroom dance competition. It’s also busting at the seams with exhilarating visual ideas in Park’s trademark use of comical match cuts and glorious double-exposure shots. In every frame of this movie, you can feel the joy of the artists making it.
Like a great joke, No Other Choice builds to a punchline that is viciously funny and also truthful, and in its ruthlessness and inventiveness, it reveals itself as one of Park’s finest films. This is a movie with tremendous control, about people who don’t have any themselves.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on SPR News.