1 month ago
15
FILM
No Other Choice ★★★★
(M) 139 minutes
Korean director Park Chan-wook is probably still best-known internationally for his wild 2003 thriller Oldboy, especially the scene where the vengeful hero swallows a live, squirming octopus while a startled young woman looks on. It’s a fair illustration of what Park’s movies tend to be like: his approach is often lurid, even cartoonish, but he isn’t kidding around.
That commitment to the bit is evident even in the broadly satirical No Other Choice, which retells a familiar story – the one about how capitalism turns us all into monsters. More specifically, it’s based on The Ax, a 1997 novel by the US crime writer Donald E. Westlake, previously adapted in 2005 by politically outspoken Greek-French director Costa-Gavras.
So Yul Choi, left, and Son Ye-jin in No Other Choice.Credit: AP
In any language, the basics are the same. The protagonist, known here as Man-soo (Lee Byung-Hun), is a well-paid middle manager for a paper manufacturing company, happily married and living the suburban dream.
Seafood, a recurring theme for Park since Oldboy, is significant here too: in the family barbeque that opens the film, we learn that the Americans who take over Man-soo’s company have sent him a gift of expensive eels, which proves to be a prelude to making him redundant.
Facing a financially uncertain future, Man-soo and his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) are forced to get rid of their beloved pet dogs and cancel Netflix, and even struggle to pay for cello lessons for their neurodivergent daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul).
Finally, enough is enough. Reasoning that business is war by other means, Man-soo sets his sights on his dream job and goes about eliminating the competition, stalking the other possible applicants and killing them one by one.
At least, that’s his plan. Like Walter White in the early episodes of Breaking Bad, Man-soo is what Americans call a “milquetoast”, meek by nature and anything but comfortable with violence. His initial efforts to reinvent himself as a ruthless criminal are played for slapstick, and go about as badly as they possibly could.
But unlike his hero, Park never misses a beat. Man-soo’s sordid bumbling serves as counterpoint to the grace of the storytelling: the smoothly integrated flashbacks, the tracking shots that invite us to guess where they might be headed, the quasi-musical use of motifs (Ri-one’s cello-playing among them), the trick of leaping unexpectedly from one scene to the next.
Park’s gift for widescreen framing is on show throughout, especially in the scenes where Man-soo is sneaking around observing his potential victims from a distance, as in an inspired scene where he contemplates eliminating a rival by dropping a flowerpot off a rooftop.
No Other Choice is not Park at his most extreme and transgressive, nor can it be considered a step towards maturity, unlike his last film, the Hitchcockian Decision To Leave. As social satire, moreover, it may not say anything all that new.
But it’s masterful on its own terms, and for all its relentless pessimism far from depressing. On the contrary, there’s something exhilarating about a filmmaker willing to go all the way.
No Other Choice is in cinemas from Thursday
