No Other Choice
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 2 hours 19 minutes
Stars: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin
Writers: Park Chan-wook, Lee Khyoung-mi, Jahye Lee
Director: Park Chan-wook
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Prominent on the short list for every Best Foreign Language Film award out there is this darkly comic primal scream of a movie; a cold-blooded caution that although machines and profit ledgers have no emotions, the people whose lives they disrupt — even basically decent ones — are in the end capable of unthinkable moral compromises.
The first film version of Donald Westlake’s satirical novel, The Ax, was Costa-Gavras’s critically acclaimed 2005 adaptation, The Axe. Two decades later, co-writer/director Park Chan-wook’s story of a man who reaches his breaking point in an era of downsizing and automation is perhaps more relevant than ever.
Man-su (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun) is a top dog in the Korean paper industry; he’s even won the coveted Pulp Man of the Year Award. But that doesn’t save him from being cruelly downsized. Man-su’s sudden sacking imperils not only his professional pride, but also the entire conspicuously consumptive lifestyle that he, his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) and two children have come to take for granted.
At first confident he’ll soon find a new job, Man-su comes to the growing realization that Korea’s paper industry is contracting drastically. In fact, only one company seems destined to survive, and that outlier has just one pending executive opening. Through some clever research, Man-su determines that in all of South Korea there are only two other men who are more qualified than he is for that job. And in a moment of awful epiphany, he realizes the only way to ensure getting said job is to kill the two guys in line ahead of him.
So begins a twisted comedy of errors as Man-su, in his suit and tie, sets off on a clumsily designed series of murderous misadventures. Despite the pitch-black premise, Lee brings soft humanity to Man-su; we’re not exactly rooting for him to dispatch these completely undeserving would-be victims, but the miracle of Lee’s performance is in his ability to never leave the viewer’s sympathies far behind.
Were No Other Choice filmed in Hollywood, great pains would have been made to imply to the audience that the men Man-su is stalking in some way deserve the fates he has in mind for them. But Park (The Handmaiden, Old Boy) refuses to let us off that easy: Man-su is a good man at heart – at least, at the outset – but so, it seems, are the men he’s targeting. That the film seamlessly manipulates our sentiments so easily first one way, then the other, is testament to Park’s mastery of his craft – and, perhaps, a condemnation of our own human nature.
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