No Other Choice

Korean maestro Park Chan-wook’s latest dark comedy follows the hapless misadventures of freshly unemployed paper industry worker You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as he struggles to get back on the market. Desperate to regain his social status and to provide for his crumbling family, he plans to hunt for his next job by literally hunting down all potential competitors.

Job hunting never felt this deadlier and cutthroat. Park Chan-wook has time and again proven that he’s a master when it comes to building tension, be it with the hallway bloodbaths of Oldboy or the intricate, intimate political conspiracies of The Handmaiden. But in his latest dark satire, which earned raves at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the director reduces his stakes to build toe-curlingly relatable stress for a working-class hero. Cooking up a barbecue for his picture-perfect family on the front lawn of his swanky brutalist-style house, You Man-su feels he has made it. On the menu is pricey eel meat, courtesy of the new American investors in his company. Little does he know this is just a consolation prize for the company’s subsequent restructuring, a corporate movie that leaves him jobless with a severance package that will barely last him three months. At home, first-world problems arise, such as the family cutting back on Netflix and fancy dinners. But for Man-su, his internal crisis is as much to do with his fears of economic destitution as with his dwindling masculinity. Unable to fathom his dental assistant wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) getting chummy with her richer, younger boss, Man-su devises an outlandish plan to lure in all potential industry competitors and kill them all. The recruiters would have “no other choice” to hire him then, right?

While its relevant themes spell out anti-capitalist satire, the direction is a masterclass in situational humor. Of course, our rookie killer with a heart bites off more than he can chew with his violent schemes playing out in slapstick fashion. Think of that chaotic second-half segue in Parasite (directed by Chan-wook’s vehemently anti-capitalist peer Bong Joon-ho) and now add a bit of Chaplin-esque flair to it. Voilà, you have an immersive, deliciously dark workplace comedy classic. To make you feel the frantic chaos of Man-su’s post-unemployment misadventures, Park Chan-wook’s usual musical collaborator Jo Yeong-wook fires up all his engines for some sweaty-trickling instrumental crescendoes. Striking down a man with a flower pot on his head or shooting down another with a gun gloved inside a mitten, such madcap situations creep up with Hitchcockian intensity when the composer’s screeching strings play along with some unblinkingly intense close-ups.

Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun plays a likeable loser for the ages. Much like any Park Chan-wook flick, No Other Choice boasts a noteworthy ensemble of character actors. All of Man-su’s potential victims are over-the-top in the right measures. K-drama star Son Ye-jin (Crash Landing on You) subverts her rom-com image to play a family matriarch who is pushed to similar levels of desperation as her unemployed husband. Her outbursts at Man-su’s man-childish insecurities add some chuckle-worthy additions to otherwise serious arguments. But the film still firmly rests on leading man Lee Byung-hun’s shoulders, who is quite the revelation here. Non-Korean viewers might remember him as a campy ninja in the G.I Joe films or the masked “Front Man” in Netflix smash hit Squid Game. But while he always had the charisma (and the jawline) to play the sexy villain type, the Korean star grounds himself in mediocrity with stunning results. Underneath his growing dark circles and unattractive uncle-like moustache, Byung-hun carries the desperation of a man who just can’t lose his fight against the system. Unlike, let’s say, the class divide montage in Parasite, No Other Choice isn’t fixated with any neorealist depictions of poverty. Despite their financial struggles, we don’t even know if Man-su’s family would pitch their tents on the pavement as he otherwise fears. But it’s the lack of identity that comes about with layoffs that this film aces so well. The hopeless and rather gullible hero isn’t a working-class hero to root for, but in his pursuit of a decent job and family life, we can’t help but root for him, no matter how loony his schemes seem. And to layer the comedy with some all-too-real economic philosophy, Man-su just cannot give up on the employee-firing, AI-dependent paper industry. It’s a toxic relationship that any sad sack corporate slave can relate to. You offer your undying loyalty to a capitalist complex only to get a few paid leaves, plenty of overworked hours (and maybe some complimentary eel meat) in return. Maybe there’s another choice out of this cubicle-binding misery, but maybe the system makes us so desperate that we are left with (excuse the pun) no other choice…