“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson
No one seems to enjoy the world we live in — in fact, everyone seems to hate it. Yet most of us accept it, see it as the only choice, play its game even if we know it’s a bunch of murderous nonsense. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice plays out the morbid, Darwinist melancholy of our economic lives to its sickest conclusions. It’s the capitalist-realist thriller par excellence, fully working through the logic of the market and playing out its most vile fantasies.
Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) is a company man, a factory floor manager for a paper mill, recently laid off after his company is bought by Americans. Met with a highly competitive market that treats him as disposable, Yoo eventually realizes that the only way to prosper is to take the ethics of the market to heart and dispose of his competition. Sourcing resumes through a fake job listing, he plots to kill the two other recently laid-off paper factory managers who stand a better chance of getting hired in the competitive market. He has a family to think of after all, a middle-class bourgeois life that needs defending: two dogs, his son’s streaming subscriptions, his daughter’s cello lessons, his wife’s tango lessons, plus a nice house with a symbolically large gate keeping out the lower classes.
Based on Donald Westlake’s dark-comedy novel The Ax, Westlake’s pitch-black satire of the sociopathy endemic to globalization and penchant for dry, irony-laced absurdity is the perfect stomping ground for Park’s goofy, Grand Guignol-flavored comedy. The setup is poignant and Park never fully loses sight of that, but the execution is musical, stuffed with sweeping camera movements and non-sequiturs that continually repeat, develop, and surprise as refrains across the film. Park is a rather hysterical filmmaker compared to clear genre antecedents like Hitchcock or De Palma, directors who were keen on using every little bit of narrative space to further tension, working stray bits of character business into densely structured payoffs. With Park’s latest stream of work, one finds a pure sense of indulgence: details emerge for their own sake and for the pleasure of their various cinematic textures with little need to hide beyond narrative motivation. Small character elements — like Yoo’s penchant for penning things down on his hand or his teetotaling or the way he occasionally gets blinded by the glare of the sun — are laid and out and called back to across the film like a wall full of Chekhovian guns, almost none of which ever go pop.
Park is perhaps the great arch stylist of 21st century cinema, and No Other Choice’s camera work is as consistently sweeping and innovative as in the rest of the director’s oeuvre. Every twist and turn is met with its own sweeping crane movement and whole emotional beats feel conjured up simply for the unique dissolves they generate. The murders are played out with particular bravado: one early kill oscillates between calculation and hard-scrabble brawling, as Yoo’s poorly conceived plan gets caught up in a love triangle between the victim, his wife, and her lover. Set against cascading diegetic music turned to top volume, it’s slippery, silly, and captivating — Torn Curtain by way of Tex Avery — morbidity dragged on well past the point of absurdity, tipping back into the realm of terror.
There has always been a Lang-like fatalism to the films of Park Chan-wook, a cynical sense that man is incapable of escaping the socially- and self-made systems of destruction that surround them. His characters rarely make it out alive, let alone with any sense of morality, redemption, or dignity. Turned toward an explicitly political context for arguably the first time since JSA (2000), No Other Choice lends an added potency and emotional truth to his bleak vision. Unlike Parasite (2019) and many other eat-the-rich class satires that have come in its wake, No Other Choice avoids the simple catharsis that comes from the us-versus-them perspective of the have and the have-nots. Told from a distinctly middle class perspective, this is instead an us-versus-us movie, an eat-each-other parable that feels significantly better equipped to embody the hysterical melancholy of the times and not just trade in its outrages and indignancies. It’s one last maniacal, depressive laugh of a moribund social order, and there’s nowhere to run, no worthy victim for us to identify with and escape behind. As bombastic and fluid as the film’s style is, its message is complimentarily clear and blunt: we’re given no other choice but savagery, and all we can do is cry in despair.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
Comments are closed.