Source: Radio New Zealand
You aren’t in much danger of walking out of No Other Choice wondering what it was about.
But director Park Chan-wook’s idiosyncratic, dark-comedy thriller is a masterclass in how hilarious, anxiety-inducing and chilling being on-the-nose can be.
When protagonist and former “Pulp Man of the Year'” Yoo Man-su loses his paper factory job in a takeover, his idyllic, summer barbeque-filled life comes under threat. As bills mount up, Yoo, his devoted wife and their kids (a boy and a girl – the daughter is a cello prodigy, of course) face the prospect selling their beautiful mid-century mansion.
This video is hosted on Youtube.
It’s a very corny opening and laid on very, very thick. We even watch their two golden retrievers being driven away in the back of a car.
Struggling to get work amid fierce competition in a dwindling, increasingly automated industry, Yoo decides the only thing left to do is to find and kill the rivals that threaten to beat him to a new job.
What follows is an equally riotous and disturbing serial killer comedy of as many errors as you’d expect when a “paper man” tries to play assassin.
Park (Oldboy, Decision to Leave) is, perhaps, best known for films where people do violence to each other with things like hammers. But much of the tension of No Other Choice is the violence that doesn’t happen – the hesitation, the doubt and the incompetence that make any given moment feel like it could go any way. It’s impossible to predict.
Every scene feels as likely to end in slapstick comedy and humiliating failure as it is to turn truly grim. What’s most remarkable isn’t the seamless pivots from comedy to darkness, but how easily it manages at go both ways at simultaneously.
As Yoo holds a giant pot plant over the edge of a building, preparing to drop it on a competitor, plant water begins to trickle out and then runs slowly down his face.
These scenes are boldly wrapped in eye-catching and idiosyncratic cinematography, as Park deploys every playful technique in the kit, and a few new ones.
Be ready for Dutch angles galore.
Even the music gets in on the comedy – although it’s a joke better not spoilt.
No Other Choice feels like a test of the limits of sympathy for the very unsympathetic goals of a mostly unsympathetic antihero.
As Yoo, Lee Byung-hun (KPop Demon Hunters, Squid Game) mugs, grimaces, panics and transparently lies his way between job interviews, killings and family time. He plays it big, exactly where the film needs it to be.
It’s also a portrayal of cowardice disguised as desperation that’s as sleazy as they come.
And while No Other Choice devotes much of its energy looking into the strange ways we deform ourselves to compete in a capitalist system that turns us on each other, it refuses to let its protagonist off the hook.
It’s just as much concerned with the kind of toxic masculinity that drives men to obsessive, silly, madness, and what it means for those around them.
These are ideas both incredibly of our times and, of course, as true now as they were in fiction hundreds of years ago.
But No Other Choice delivers them in a heart-stopping, side-splitting vehicle that is a hard to compete with.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand