There are a number of films about people trying to invent themselves before a crisis. There are many fewer films about people who violently refuse to even consider the idea – people who would rather kill someone other than be Someone else. Park Chan-Wooks gloomy, brilliant and murderous funny “No other choice“Is the exception that proves the rule.
This Distriblablack -Comedy tells the story of a mustsched paper manufacturing specialist (“planned with ornate precision but develops with the panic of a desperate man.Octopus“Villain Lee Byung-Hun as Man-Su) who achieves the suburban idyll just in time to be released from the company where he has worked for the past 25 years. Some American investors have bought a piece of the business, and with that right to restructure things they see.
The advanced agency that Man-Su received in the post should have been his first idea that he was on the chopping block. Instead, man-su saw it as proof that he had finally done it. “I have everything,” he sighs over the grill as he grills for his smile Mrs. Miri (son Yejin) and their two children on the lawn for the brutal man he bought as a monument for his success.
But it’s already gone. “Off with your head” is a common abstinence in Korea When someone gets fired, and Man-Su really reacts to the loss of his job as if it were an execution. He is struggling to find another gig in the fast -contracting paper industry (and to wave away dark thoughts about her obliged wife fucks her tennis instructor), but there is too much competition for the few places that remain, and he refuses to consider another career path.
Man-Su’s Only Hope: A position at Ascendant Moon Paper, where he would work as a subordinate one of his former underlines. The interview is a disaster, but just like his old company had “no other choice” but to release him, man-su conspires to give the moon’s paper managers “no other choice” without bringing him on board. The paper industry is a fairly specialized area, and man-Su reasons for having to only murder a powerful three people to become the only dismissed candidate for the job. It does not seem like an unreasonable number of body for someone who is going out on their mortgage – someone who has already suffered the indignity to be forced to cancel their family’s Netflix account. So Man-Su publishes an ad for a fake new company as a bait for its competition and orchestras a plan to kill back to the top.
Or to stay in the upper middle, I would say. Among the more tragic irony of “no other choice” is that Man-Su goes to wild extremes just to avoid the fear of falling into a slightly lower tax class. According to his mind, the line between heaven and hell is as thin as the glass walls of the spectacular greenhouse where man-Su tends to their bonsai trees at night.
But Park’s film – Despite spit capitalism with much of the same wit, grief and slapstick is buffets that made Bong Joon Ho’s “parasite” so resonant around the world – clearly not about poverty. While Miri can no longer afford to put meat in the noodle soup as she does for dinner, her children never risk being hungry. This is a story of nutrition of another kind; It is a “Looney Tunes” -like fable about how capitalism exercises itself by feeding our self -pictures when it takes our wallets, and by conflicting what we do with who we are so that you become addicted to the other.
That feeling infects society at almost all levels. The movie is the first Life is so much more fun when it happens to other people Snicker-a staple in Park’s dark human humor-comes from the view of Man-Su getting naked by a store uniform when he finishes a retail job to participate in his lunar paper interview. But when you focus on an upward mobile stiver like Man-Su, “no other choice” avoids both and the right to dramatize the more related dilemma to root your entire identity in a system that will tear you out of the earth without a second thought.
Immaculathely spacious for a story this unwell, Park’s movie toys with the idea that capitalism is an engine for moral impunity – that it is a generally accepted apology for the kind of thoughtless atrocities that work beyond in some other context. And even though we understand the general outline of Man-Su plan from the beginning, it is so exciting to see it play (and go wrong) because “no other choice” sees that his murder spree as a natural extension of capitalism, rather than a bizarre deviation from it. Demented, yes. Crazy, not so much.
The result is the rare film that feels sympathetic towards his protagonist without ever rooting for him, and Lee’s elastic performance such as Man-Su-Klumpy, pathetic, checked by osmosis, and still just a hair that is worse than we are the key to balancing the Park’s tragicomic tone. Easy to roll your eyes off from the opening scene and increasingly pigheaded in all those who follow, Man-Su starts far from equivalent and tumble much lower in our estimate from there. But the high-wire nature of the movie’s plot requires us to appreciate the credibility of man-su’s conviction without necessarily sharing it ourselves (there’s a terrific scene where an oblivious man-su lectures one of Him In Our Heads), and No One On Earth Can Match Park’s Signature Ability To Make Characters more Lovely when they stumble towards the void.
In Much of the Filmmaker’s Previous Work, that ability has been expressed with the sweep of a symphony and the precision of a swiss watch, but howver tempting it is to bemoan the fact that park’s work has been growing less hyper-style “the hand. Genius), There’s A Unique Thrill in Watching One of the World’s Most Fastidious Directors Adapt A Story (From Donald Westlake’s 1997 The novel “The Ax”) about a half -dressed idiot whose first idea is to release a flower pot on someone’s head. Imagine that Wes Anderson is collaborating with Joaquin Phoenix and you will have a vague idea of the excitement that is inherent in Park Chan-Wook and building a movie around a guy like Man-Su, who plot like the villain from “Oldboy” or the heroine in “Lady Vengeance” but runs with all grace. Man-Su is a bottomless well of physical comedy and is so bad at killing people that it eventually begins to seem as if he may be the only person who does not survive this movie.
“No other choice” is unequivocally still a Park Chan-Wook project on the face (I dropped the bill of all diabolical match cuts, devastated transitions and delirious zooms that he puts to another string and harpsschord masterpiece from his long composer Cho young, and it is intended to be meant to be intended. and I stress as relative, and I stress relativelypeeled the romance of “decision to leave.” The raw method not only offers a meta-textual twist on the tension that pulls man-suar in the seams (that between resistance and reinforcement), it also creates a more immediate tension: it between a delicate arranged film and a protagonist so chaotic that you can hardly imagine he is doing something right. This means that “no other choice” can be both greater than life and also only a few missed paycheck from a conceivable reality.
But the man we see at the end of his rope is not the same man-Su who won his industry’s most sought after and meaningless award just a few years earlier. He is better in some ways and worse in several others. More importantly, he was more practical then. Having a steady job can have that effect. Now it is up to his wife Miri, another of Park’s indelible female trails, to be the family’s last bastion of logic.
When Man-Su’s bow begins to wither towards the end of the story, the raw violence in his plan gradually overgrown with garden metaphors and magical thinking, Miri’s presence becomes stronger to balance things. Although “no other choice” lacks the emotional gut punch in Park’s best films (just like its devastating ironic final shot leaves a lasting bruise in itself), Miri becomes a gripping vessel for all the opponent and survival of the film. It is Miri who is forced to account for what is important to their family and what they can be willing to live with or without. It is Miri who makes the most difficult choices in a movie where everyone else refuses to accept that they have some choices to make at all.
Miri’s final decision that (edited) is as easy to punish as Man-Su first Decision to become a serial killer, but – to the huge credit for a Slaphappy movie with a surprisingly powerful sting – it is also just as difficult to dismiss immediately. She sticks to the only choice that all this madness has left her, and when the world around her hands over her last measure of agency to the demands of an apathetically effective future (screams to AI!), Miri’s refusal to abandon what is left of her almost like her own fucked type of heroic action. Capitalism never cares about you, but people will always be full of surprises.
Rating: A-
“No other choice” premiered at 2025 Venice Film festival. Neon will release it in the United States.
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