None are exempt from the dehumanization of capitalism. It has always been true but has felt supercharged in the modern era. The movements of monopolies, mergers, conglomerates leaves so many people behind, who are then forced into desperate circumstances to hang onto the comforts of their lives and livelihoods. And whatever comes of it is no guarantee. There is no job security in the modern age -not really. So few understand how close they are to the brink until they are literally looking down it.
No Other Choice is Park Chan-wook’s Parasite. Just as Bong Joon-ho’s now classic film examined the impacts of late-stage capitalism and the extremes it drives people towards, so too does his friend Park’s new movie showcase with raw anger the ramifications of an unfeeling system on everyday people forced to contend with it for their survival. Where Bong honed in on a poor and struggling family, Park centres a patriarch who is notably much better off -but the weight that is felt is much the same; though Park invests his film with beats of much crueler irony than Bong, his hero prompted to more severe action simply to hedge his bets at not losing the lifestyle he’s built and feels he deserves.
The film is actually adapted from an American novel called The Ax by Donald Westlake (it was previously made into a French film but has interestingly not been translated in its native country). Lee Byung-hun stars as Yoo Man-su, a twenty-five year veteran of a paper mill who has built a comfortable life off the stability of his job, buying back his beloved childhood home in which to raise his family -consisting of his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), a teenage stepson, young cello prodigy daughter, and two dogs. But then his company is bought out by an American giant and he and all his colleagues are laid off. Unemployed without prospects in his now competitive field of expertise, failing interviews, and facing possible foreclosure of his home and downsizing, Man-su decides to better his chances at a new equivalent job by systematically killing off his competition.
It really is a literal manifestation of the grind, working joes engaged in a clash of violence all for a scrap of sustainability provided by the upper class. On top of that, Man-su has to grapple with the earth having shifted beneath him since he entered the field. A younger manager who laughs him out of a job is engaged in the digital marketing realm -his work half-consisting of TikToks promoting the brand, something Man-su has no understanding of. That value in his work as he worked has been lost, and Lee does a great job communicating the subtle anxiety around that and the inability to fully reckon with it. It is a sad character portrait, especially in light of a viciously sunny opening sequence that contrasts his happy ordinary life with what it will become with the loss of his job. And Park is downright mean about it.
Of course he has fun with that tone. The grimness of Man-su’s machinations is contrasted against his amateur execution of them. The gun he decides to employ for his murders is -ironically given his work- 3D-printed. He is terrible at staking out a place, as with his first intended victim, who gets his own storyline related to his joblessness and cratering relationship with his wife. There’s very much a Coen Brothers-kind of incompetence though in Man-su’s plotting; a confrontation that at one point devolves into three people desperately trying to grab at a gun that has been kicked too far under a desk. Another victim has to be contorted in a manner both amusing and disturbing in order for the body to be disposed of efficiently. Man-su has a complex relationship to his actions as well. He hesitates for his first murder, which proves a critical mistake, he tries to awkwardly shield his eyes from the face of his target whilst trying to shoot them, which goes about as well as you’d expect. And emotionally he makes the mistake of relating with his victims -who are in somewhat the same boat as him with regards to his career. But it is the only way he can be sure to get ahead. He has no other choice.
It's hyperbolic, but it is a potent level of messaging, Park's cynicism with this state of things dripping through the screen. Critique of the establishment in South Korea goes without saying -there is a particularly stinging sequence at the beginning satirizing emotional support organizations for those who lose their jobs; but it is noteworthy that the inciting incident is kicked off by the Americans -not the Chinese, or the Russians or the Japanese, each of whom would have made as much sense. It's reminiscent of Bong's The Host, where American capitalism is established at the start as the instigator of the woes for the Koreans through the run of the story. Park is not blaming the Americans solely, but he is pointing the finger at a pattern of global monopolistic market dominance that they are the spearhead entity of. Those imperialist tendrils (seen also in the family's Netflix habit among other things) are what is ultimately choking out Man-su, symbolizing the comforts and status he is desperate not to lose, and thus rationalizing his violence.
A lot of the movie's bite comes out of its compatibility with Park's boisterously vivid and intentional filmmaking. His curiously mobile camera and compositional editing ensures that no scene is devoid of something interesting in the frame -be it his sometimes intense sometimes comical zooms and close-ups, his eccentric mise-en-scene to impart a tonal cue, or his inventive illustrations of modern communication. His movies are noted for their intense imagery and No Other Choice is no exception -a lot of it concentrated in Lee's anxious or desperate expressions. It is their first movie together in twenty-five years yet the chemistry feels second-nature. They both wring the most out of the drama required -as much as Park roots the movie firmly in his dark and twisted satire, there are moments here and there of real beauty and pathos, particularly where his relationship with his family is concerned -and the consequences his actions have on them.
The movie's ending is a perfect stroke of absurdism, a bleak and damning image of what all Man-su's efforts are really in aid of, Lee forced to exist in a space of denial and delusion. It is pitiful, depressing, a touch infuriating -Park punctuates his point with appropriate venom. No Other Choice isn't quite as thrilling or provocative as some of Park's other movies of late, but it has a profoundly relevant edge and an engrossing conceit. Still at the top of his form, Park is bitterly concerned, and we have no other choice but to pay attention to why.
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