NO OTHER CHOICE – Review by Sarah Ward
Sorry, Severance!No Other Choice is currently pop culture’s top-ranking candidate in espousing the importance of work-life balance, defining your identity by something other than your profession and never forgetting that capitalism cares less than zero for everyday employees. Life in general should’ve already stressed these points, whether or not you’ve unexpectedly been made redundant from a longstanding job that you always went above and beyond for and, thanks to the quality of your work and that dedication, were praised as a model member as staff at including outside of the company, as Lee Byung-hun’s Man-su has. Reflecting reality with sparkling clarity doesn’t make Park Chan-wook’s black comedy any less sharp or savage, the latter in a so-truthful-it-cuts-to-the-bone fashion. The act of severing, in the losing employment sense, is in No Other Choice’s wheelhouse, then, and the movie’s synergies with the off-screen landscape are mission critical.
Corporate jargon aptly peppers the picture’s screenplay, which Park adapted with Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee (a script editor on the filmmaker’s Decision to Leave, co-producer on TV series The Sympathizer, assistant on fellow small-screen effort The Little Drummer Girl and assistant director on The Handmaiden) and Don McKellar (The Sympathizer’s co-creator, co-writer and co-showrunner). Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax has reached the screen before, initially by Costa-Gavras via entertaining 2005 French release The Axe; although No Other Choice features mid-2020s specifics, factors jeopardising jobs and excuses used by thoughtless executives to slash their workforces among them, the situation that it depicts keeps proving timeless in modern-day existence. Titling this tale with three words overused by managers dispensing with staff, however, hammers home how empty justifications can be utilised for anything and how commonly they are. Many within the film mention that they have no other choice, no matter how drastic or destructive their actions. When he starts murdering his competition for a new gig, Man-su utters the phrase himself.
No Other Choice begins with its protagonist happily enjoying the spoils of his commitment to Solar Paper, his source of a paycheck for 25 years. The lavish suburban home that he calls his own was his childhood house, which he toiled hard to buy as an adult. Outside with his loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), teenage son Si-one (Kim Woo Seung) and younger daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul), plus golden retrievers Si-two and Ri-two, he barbecues eel sent to him by his bosses. Nothing appears amiss. But the seafood isn’t a reward; rather, it’s a parting gift, as Man-su only discovers as he’s trying to champion his team to Solar’s new American owners and stave off their layoffs. That plenty of others are in the same position doesn’t make the ordeal any less dehumanising or humiliating. Attempting to find a new job in the industry, a task harder than the former Pulp Man of the Year anticipates, also hasn’t gotten any less brutal 13 months later when he’s making ends meet at a big-box retailer, scrambling to attend interviews, eradicating his family’s luxuries and contemplating selling his beloved abode.
The question that Man-su is grappling with, that Park gleans — the audience, too — but he can’t, that the always-exceptional Lee helps emphasize with his masterclass of a comic-yet-tragic performance, is whether everything that the character has given his job for so long, and the person that he has always believed that he was as a result, means absolutely nothing. It does to Solar and to the similar firms that fail to hire him, at least (begging on a bathroom floor is a low point). As Man-su desperately tries to hang on to the career that he adores, though, with also out-of-work veterans Bummo (Lee Sung-min) and Sijo (Cha Seung-won) in his sights, he answers that query without realising. If he has no other choice but to turn serial killer against other paper workers — resorting to placing fake wanted ads in trade publications to survey the field of applicants and pick his targets — is that sense of self actually worth anything, even as he remains so assured that it’s the only thing that matters?
No Other Choice understands feeling like you and your profession are one and the same, and doing so proudly. It also knows that this is the status quo that workers are sold, not that there’s much choice in buying it. And, the film appreciates the complicated emotions that spring when the certainty that you and your work are deeply intertwined, and the expectation that your expertise, diligence and loyalty will protect you from any unwanted change to that fact, is suddenly shattered. Park’s smart satire, as The Ax and The Axe did before it, also spies how harmful this perception is. It asks what we all should: how can fulfilment truly beckon when these are the stakes and the costs? And when Man-su and everyone except the one percent are just disposable components, capable of being callously tossed aside with no notice, in someone else’s pursuit of more and more profits?
Revenge and Park might’ve become synonymous across his career, as gifting cinema the superb Vengeance Trilogy, aka Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, cemented, but Man-su isn’t seeking retribution against those who’ve wronged him in No Other Choice. Instead, he’s been fooled into pointing fingers at and felling others that’ve been just as wronged themselves. There’s no doubting Park’s skills with comedy and satire, or Lee’s in front of his lens. Reteaming for the first time since 2004’s Three… Extremes, after their notable collaboration on 2000’s also-excellent Joint Security Area confirmed both filmmaker and actor among South Korea and the globe’s finest talents, they’re a dream pairing together again and with the material. No Other Choice wouldn’t sting and amuse as heartily if Park wasn’t as adept at staging slapstick as slayings, usually combining the two and always layering them with discerning insights, or if Lee wasn’t inspired as a relatable everyman in a psychological and existential tussle, as well as at eliciting earned sympathy.
In addition to being an incisively of-the-moment movie — joining One Battle After Another, Eddington, Weapons, Highest 2 Lowest, and the duo of 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple among the past year’s perfectly placed celluloid mirrors, but again timely ever since Westlake put pen to paper almost three decades ago — this is a meticulous picture. An auteur with an eye as precise and sumptuous as Park, who works here with his The Little Drummer Girl cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, is the best there is at harnessing every visual detail in service of a film’s story and substance. One key instance: when Man-su stands atop a roof, two levels above the man with the role that he covets, ready to throw a heavy chilli plant downwards. Peering upwards, the frame moves tight as No Other Choice’s central figure strains with the leaking pot’s weight over his head, and looks as likely to wear it. Man-su has already been promoted outwards, as the inane euphemism for firings goes. Now, he’s tellingly poised to either knock himself out of the running for every job or end up suffering from his own mess.
