Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice

Lee stars in Park’s No Other Choice as Man-soo, a paper factory manager with a loving wife, two kids, two handsome golden retrievers, and a painstakingly (and expensively) renovated home, and he “undoubtedly delivers one of the year’s great leading performances as a desperate corporate crumb,” writes Luke Georgiades for A Rabbit’s Foot. After twenty-five years at the company, the Americans are taking over, and higher-ups pass along word to Man-soo that they have “no other choice” but to let him go.

Man-soo swears to carry on providing for his family. He applies and interviews (disastrously) for another job, but the paper industry is consolidating, and competition is tight. For a while, he finds himself stacking boxes in a warehouse. His wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), finds work as a dental hygienist. Corners are cut. Netflix is canceled. What hits hardest, though, is selling the house.

Man-soo hatches a plan. He’ll knock off the guy who holds the position at a rival paper company that he wants, and for good measure, wipe out any fellow candidates with serious potential as well. “But he hasn’t realized what a messy and complicated business murder can be,” writes the BBC’s Nicholas Barber. “And he hasn’t realized that, as fellow ‘pulp men,’ his targets will be uncomfortably similar to him. Essentially, he will be trying to kill different versions of himself.”

And as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich puts it, Man-soo “plots like the villain from Oldboy or the heroine of Lady Vengeance but executes with all the grace of Wile E. Coyote. A bottomless wellspring of physical comedy, Man-soo is so bad at killing people that it eventually starts to seem as if he might be the only person who doesn’t survive this movie.”

In Variety, Jessica Kiang observes that “the more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture. Operating in delicious collaboration with his inspired Little Drummer Girl DP Kim Woo-hyung, practically every shot feels like it was the one Park couldn’t wait to stage.”

“There’s a chase framed through convex traffic mirrors,” notes Leonardo Goi at Notebook, “and for another shot the camera is stuck to the bottom of a drinking glass. As the film marches to its gruesome climax, storylines and images do not cut so much as spill into each other. Here, as in the best of his works, Park welds a bristling social critique to a playful cinematic intelligence, and the results are often exhilarating.”

“Some will surely be reminded of 2019’s Parasite, which of course turned Park’s good friend and occasional collaborator Bong Joon Ho into a household name,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “The two movies do share a portrait of capitalism in extremis, in which the race to hold onto increasingly smaller pieces of a rapidly dissolving pie feeds more surreal transgressions . . . But Park’s ability to manipulate his imagery is something else entirely. His dissolves and overlays and intercutting are formal and sensual expressions of his great subject: that all of us are trapped in the same socio-economic and psychological nightmare.”

Park has wanted to adapt Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax for twenty years. In 2005, Costa-Gavras directed an adaption in French, Le couperet, and Park dedicates No Other Choice to him. Costa-Gavras’s wife and son serve as producers. Having premiered in competition in Venice, No Other Choice is now screening in Toronto and will open Busan on September 17. Next month, the film will head to festivals in Vancouver,Mill Valley, and London and screen as part of the Main Slate in New York.