No Other Choice
by Hope Madden
Few directors working today wield the craft as masterfully as Park Chan-wook. He combines genres and slides from tone to tone effortlessly, mingling humor and tension, satire and tenderness, mystery and pathos and blood like no one else. Though his style is unmistakable, somehow each Park film is wildly original, entirely its own.
No Other Choice may, in fact, be more unusual than the others, although there’s something familiar in its opening. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) celebrates a gift from his paper company’s American owners with a barbeque in the back yard. He loves his home, he loves his family, his dogs, the greenhouse where he tinkers, the dance lessons he takes with his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin). Man-su is happy.
This being a movie, and this scene being its opening, we know Man-su will not be happy for long. The filmmaker does nothing to hide the cinematic artifice of his prelude, introducing the buoyant corporate satire of reinvention, or the refusal to reinvent.
That gift of expensive eel was a going away present, and Man-su is about to be out of work, along with a lot of other local middle aged middle managers in the paper business.
There’s not a weakness in this cast, but both Lee and Son are flawless. Each character takes a proactive yet romantic approach to navigating this setback, both guided by their own internal logic. Her logic looks a little more logical: cut back on luxuries like Netflix and dance classes, sell the house, carpool.
Man-su’s plan is a little bigger: create an opening that fits his skills and eliminate all competition for that job. So, murder.
Park’s crafted a seething satire on capitalism but manages to edge the biting farce with strange moments of deep empathy—just one example of the tonal tightrope Park doesn’t just walk, he prances across.
No Other Choice is complicated but never convoluted, constantly compelling and almost alarmingly funny. Between the intricate detail of the thriller and the gallows humor of the comedy, Park crafts a wondrously entertaining film.
