‘No Other Choice’ Review: Park Chan-wook’s Dazzling Murder Comedy is a Masterclass in Controlled Chaos
You have been fired. You have taken a menial job and are barely scraping together the family necessities: food, mortgage, frequently tadum-ing Netflix account. But wait! Now you are interviewing for a position for which you are superbly qualified! And you’ve been forewarned about the boss’s trickiest question! Unfortunately, however, you are in a Park Chan-wook movie and he is in scathingly playful form, and so a bothersome shaft of sunlight keeps bouncing off the skyscraper opposite. However much you fidget in your seat you cannot angle its glare out of your eyes. You smile too wide at the interviewers’ unimpressed silhouettes, showing too many teeth. You are Mansu (an irreplaceable Lee Byung-hun), and the film you don’t know you’re in is delectable dark comedy “No Other Choice,” the latest exhibit in the mounting body of evidence suggesting Park Chan-wook may be the most elegant filmmaker alive.
At the outset, Mansu has it all. This we know because as he gathers his family — wife Miri (Son Yejin), teen son Si-one (Kim Woo Seung), little daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul) and their two gorgeous golden retrievers — in for a “one-minute hug” in the pleasantly overgrown garden of his eccentric, beloved home, he looks up into the summer sky as blossoms pretty the air and sighs “I have it all.” The tweeness is a deliberate set-up, but it’s also strangely effective: A man should be bestowed with only as many blessings as he can appreciate, but Mansu appreciates all of his, so vocally and unreservedly, and wants for nothing more than this level of domestic contentment, that we are immediately charmed onto his side. We never really leave it, despite all the obviously terrible, ridiculous, often grisly things he’s about to do.
Mansu has worked for decades managing the “specialist paper” area of a paper factory that, under new management by Americans, abruptly lays him off. At home, resourceful Miri cheerfully rationalizes their expenditures, cancelling tennis lessons and their couples’ dance class, and even sending the dogs off to live with her parents. Everything must go, except silent little oddball Ri-one’s cello lessons — they’ve been told she has talent. The hardest cut of all: the decide to sell the house Mansu was so proud of buying. It was his childhood home (a masterpiece of Ryu Seong-hie’s exceptional production design, all eccentric kinks and deep-focus corners and rooftop spying vantage points) and features a lovingly hand-built greenhouse where green-thumbed Mansu spends much of his free time. The “Parasite” house it is not, even though, with its anti-capitalist messaging, rageful sense of humor and sharp-edged construction “No Other Choice” does share quite some DNA with Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winner.
As Mansu’s severance pay dwindles, Miri goes back to work at a dental clinic where the hot young dentist is an immediate source of jealousy for Mansu, who refuses to even let him look at his constantly aching tooth. But then Mansu’s jealousy points everywhere these days, particularly at Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee Soon), the hotshot manager at a rival paper company who sneered at Mansu when he came begging for work. “Why can’t he get hit by lightning?” Miri says jokingly as she snuggles up to her husband on the couch while he obsesses over Choi’s social media. And thus, an idea drops down on Mansu like a plant pot from a balcony.
Of course, he soon comes to reason that even if Choi was out of the way, there’d be no guarantee he’d get his position. So Mansu embarks on an elaborate scheme to identify the other potential candidates ahead of him in line, so he can off them as well. He finds just two: Gu Bummo (Lee Sung Min) who’s been drinking himself into a daily stupor since getting laid off, much to the annoyance of his flouncily theatrical wife Ara (a very funny Yeom Hye Ran); and gentle family man Go Sijo (Cha Seung Won) a meek shoe-store salesman who is, at heart, passionately a paper man. Indeed, there is a whole lot of insidery paper-production talk peppering the screenplay (which was co-written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee and Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar). And it culminates in Go’s nostalgic soliloquy about producing the material for everything from banknotes to lottery tickets to the moisture-wicking topsheets on menstrual pads, which is honestly rather lovely and sad.
None of Mansu’s projected killings goes according to plan. How could they possibly, with this inept and inexperienced a murderer? Mansu apparently never met a muddy bank he didn’t end up tumbling inelegantly down and Miri has perfected the art of the inopportune FaceTime call (once again, after “Decision to Leave,” Park proves himself the filmmaker best able to make an actually cinematic aesthetic out of modern tech). And might Ri-one’s habit of parroting phrases she’s overheard develop into some kind of Hitchcockian twist? Not to mention that the victims all have their own angular, absurdist personality traits and refuse to be simply the inert buffers that will send events pinballing precisely according to the immutable laws of murder-plot physics.
But the more chaos descends, the more meticulously controlled Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways for the camera and the actors to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture. Operating in delicious collaboration with his inspired “Little Drummer Girl” DP Kim Woo-hyung, practically every shot feels like it was the one Park couldn’t wait to stage. A chase is glimpsed momentarily through two convex traffic mirrors on a steeply sloping street. Mansu chats while his daughter sits on a garden swing, as indicated by Ri-one’s yellow boots constantly bobbing into frame. From far and wide away, some nefarious business unfolds on a nighttime roadside where the terracotta tarmac contrasts gorgeously with the dark jade of the crashing sea nearby.
“No Other Choice” is based on the 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax” which was adapted once before in 2005 by Costa-Gavras into the enjoyable French-language “The Axe” (“Le couberet”). Park, who has been trying to get this film made for 20 years dedicates it, rather touchingly, to Costa-Gavras, whose wife and son serve as producers. So this American novel has been twice adapted outside the US, and this time, with Park at height of his powers, it finds new textures of dread and hilarity in the codified professional hierarchies of Korea, a society where men are still largely expected to be the family breadwinners and in the year of our lord 2025, where the idea of murdering to get ahead has started not to sound quite so insane. Kind of like the scene where Mansu, a nasty drunk who’s been teetotal for years, finally takes a drink and the camera stays steady on the glass as it empties, perhaps “No Other Choice” is really just tapping into the way we all feel, like we’re still upright and the world that has turned sideways instead.
