No Other Choice, 2025.
Directed by Park Chan-wook.
Starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won, Kim Woo-seung, Choi So-yul, Kim Hyeong-mook, Woo Jeong-won, Yoo Yeon-seok, Yoon Ga-i, Oh Dal-su, Lee Suk-hyeong, Oh Kwang-rok, Lee Yong-nyeo, Kim Hae-sook, Im Tae-poong, Nam Jin-bok, and Ahn Hyun-ho.
SYNOPSIS:
After being unemployed for several years, a man devises a unique plan to secure a new job: eliminate his competition.
Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) has it all: an idyllic family life and home with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), two young children, and two dogs, providing for everyone through a steady role at a specialty paper manufacturing company. Well, one of those things goes first in the latest from legendary South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (who has yet to make anything less than outright terrific, often plunging much deeper into the psychological complexities of his sometimes hyperviolent and twisty experiences), jeopardizing everything else in Man-soo’s life that falls like dominoes in No Other Choice collaborating with screenwriters Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Don McKellar, based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax).
Or so Man-soo projects that he doesn’t have any other choice but to resort to violent means to resecure employment. With a legendary crashout along the way, enabled by the behavior, anxieties, and issues of his laid-off workforce competitors, he begins meddling to weed them out. As sadistically thrilling and deviously entertaining as it is watching this last-straw psychopath bumbling his plotting and killing off anyone with the same job qualifications as him (there aren’t many specialty paper manufacturers left), it’s also a darkly hilarious look at the lengths men will go to avoid addressing the real fears and emotions of inadequacy stemming from being out of a job, feeling emasculated from being unable to provide.
At one point in the film, one wife tells a husband that the problem isn’t that they can’t find work, but rather how they are handling being jobless. That is No Other Choice in a nutshell, taken to the absurd, sharply-written, diabolically and thematically rich extreme: Man-soo’s sense of right and wrong generally deteriorates, while he sometimes puts on a hypocritical front to protect his family and his eldest son from a path of lesser crimes. Yes, this is a mind-bender about an elaborate scheme to hide a series of murders from some dimwitted local authorities, but it’s also a labyrinthine look at the mindset of a screw-loosed provider who loses their cushion, especially in this day and age of fewer and fewer jobs. Admittedly, there are a couple of pacing issues (certain stretches involving his victims go on longer than others), but in the film’s defense, the glorified stories always have an impact on Man-soo’s mental state and actions.
No Other Choice is also stunningly shot (courtesy of cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung), often using dissolves and transitions that mirror and juxtapose characters’ behaviors, or innovative visual flourishes such as attaching a camera to unlikely places. Equally hypnotic is Cho Young-wuk’s score, though one of the most intense and compellingly conceived sequences occurs during a three-way standoff, with one gun and music blaring so loud that even the subtitles change their style to reflect it. It is one of those arresting scenes of dynamic cinematography and action (albeit far less violent here) that leave one feeling as if they are levitating while watching a Park Chan-Wook thriller.
Naturally, No Other Choice is a film of the times, with a bleak, depressingly realistic ending. Man-soo is understandably an empathetic figure considering current events (and also brilliantly performed by Lee Byung-hun, delivering a conflicted turn of controlled rage, bitterness, jealousy, paranoia, and black comedy), but representative of something much more believably cynical. Then there are layers to the film that will undoubtedly have their own deep think pieces written about them, such as a rotten truth that starts infecting Man-soo as his unhinged scheming unfolds. Apparently, for Park Chan-wook, the only choice is to make great films, never settling for anything less.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
