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| Images courtesy of NEON |
South Korean master filmmaker and provocateur Park Chan-wook
the director of films like Oldboy, Joint Security Area and The Handmaiden has been developing No Other Choice, an adaptation of Donald
Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax which itself was made into a 2005 film The
Axe by Greek director Costa-Gavras, since the tail end of the 2000s. The story of a middle-aged paper company
manager who is fired due to the company restructuring and struggles to make
ends meet before ultimately deciding to stalk and murder his competitors to get
back on top, it was a satirical darkly comical critique of the layoff
experience as a modern-day capitalist Great Depression with a white fanged survival-of-the-fittest
sociopolitical outlook.
A years-in-development dream project for Chan-wook in 2009
before being put on hold by his 2012 English language debut Stoker, No
Other Choice was eventually revived in 2019 with none other than
Costa-Gavras himself contributing to the South Korean director’s
reinterpretation of Westlake’s material.
Still stalled by ongoing developments before coming together sometime in
2024 and picked up by NEON who recently theatrically reissued the 4K
restoration of Oldboy, No Other Choice is the kind of impeccable
tragicomic sterile/messy, tender/violent cinematic expression that not only demands
the largest screen viewing possible but also further canonizes Lee Byung-hun as
Chan-wook’s penultimate actor even over Choi Min-sik and Song Kang-ho. In the Lady Vengeance director’s
hands, Westlake’s novel feels like an acerbic fourth iteration of his beloved Vengeance
Trilogy featuring some of the most painterly and astoundingly beautiful
vistas of the filmmaker’s canon.
Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a successful longtime employee of
Solar Paper living in splendor and wealth with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), two
children and their golden retrievers.
Residing comfortably in a fancy home, their glamorous and tranquil world
is shattered when an American company assumes control of the business and
begins mass terminations of employment with Man-su on the chopping block. Struggling months later to make ends meet
with their house posted for sale, dogs sold and jettisoning expensive classes
for their kids as they relocate to a cheaper apartment, Man-su’s predicament
worsens when he tries to hire into another papermaking outfit and is instead
rebuffed by manager Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon).
In a fit of desperation, Man-su mulls over offing Seon-chul by dropping
a potted plant on his head from several feet above. Realizing it’ll make little difference, he changes
strategy to track down other papermakers and effectively draw up a hitlist to
more or less try and murder his way back to his tranquil picturesque perch from
on high.
Hilarious and horrifying, an exquisitely rendered kind of Parasite
aged in reverse riches-to-rags tragicomic fable with the director’s
trademark Earthy and concrete imagery laced with uncompromising viciousness, No
Other Choice is most certainly the film Park Chan-wook and his following
have been working towards his whole career.
Painterly and often playful featuring tablet, cellphone and laptop
screen reflections like you’ve never seen before and a sly ode to Alfred
Hitchcock’s Suspicion that more than one-ups the legendary milk glass
shot, it represents an audiovisual tour-de-force made by a master who is
playing his viewership like a grand piano, delighting and dazzling in between
brutalization. A film that hits every
mark and then somehow manages to transcend even our expectations of this
already daring provocateur, No Other Choice while not for the faint
hearted is an excellent unfettered slice of purely technical craftsmanship on
proud display.
A digital workflow production lensed with finesse and grace
in scope 2.35:1 widescreen by The Little Drummer Girl cinematographer
Kim Woo-hyung with a punctuated, pointedly arresting score by longtime composer
and creative collaborator Jo Yeong-wook whose unforgettable soundtrack to Oldboy
doesn’t stay with you so much as it seeps and burrows, No Other Choice is
also characterized by the emotionally overwhelming use of Mozart amid American
blues and Korean pop tune needle drops.
The kind of exercise in filmmaking that will be studied in reverent awe
for years to come with razor-sharp elliptical editing featuring transitions
between shots that defy the eyes and always brilliant production design, what
really elevates No Other Choice to sheer total grandeur is the reunion
of Park Chan-wook and his leading man Lee Byung-hun.
Starting out together with Joint Security Area in an
important supporting role as well as the director’s Three Extremes segment
Cut, Lee Byung-hun was already an established veteran of the South
Korean silver screen but here at long last is a leading role the now legendary
performer can really fully sink his teeth into.
Embodying both the cheerful chipper shit-eating-grin and the capacity
for cunning ruthlessness, he’s the kind of unjustly wrong everyman our
sympathies begin with until the film starts placing us at arm’s length with
him. Son Ye-jin as Man-su’s beleaguered
wife who has to leave her Fabergé egg and find work, nearly prostituting
herself at one point, is no stranger to the director’s universe having starred
in The Truth Beneath a film written by Chan-wook years prior and she
dives in fearlessly and believably begins growing ever more suspicious of her
husband. Also turning over startling
performances are Yeom Hye-ran from Memories of Murder and Seven Days actor
Park Hee-soon as well as some of Chan-wook’s regular bit players. Mostly though, this is the auteur’s show from
start to finish with debatably the ultimate Chan-wook character played with
gusto by Byung-hun.
Released in IMAX in South Korea while the US got a
one-night-only screening in December of last year before a general wide release
followed this month, No Other Choice became the director’s biggest
commercial success to date surpassing his Vengeance Trilogy and The
Handmaiden. Becoming a unanimous
critical triumph, the film also won numerous film festival awards including the
Stockholm FIPRESCI Award while the New York Times heaped immense praise on
actor Lee Byung-hun who also was honored a Special Tribute Award by TIFF. Considered by longtime Chan-wook disciples to
be the South Korean maestro’s finest production yet if not his most technically
and conceptually ambitious yet, No Other Choice inexplicably snubbed by
the Oscars yet now in theatrical release is the kind of perfectly poised and
executed masterwork that comes once in a lifetime.
There’s a real, at times staggering, sense of
awe and wonderment to Chan-wook’s crisp high-resolution imagery which is still
unafraid to get knee deep in the grisly and transgressive amid the distantly sterile
and antiseptic. No this won’t be the one
that gets those put off by Chan-wook’s extremity to sit through another of his,
but for those who know full well what we’re getting ourselves into it is a
deliriously thrilling and jet-black hilarious vision that will surely be fiercely
debated among cinephiles for years to come.
--Andrew Kotwicki
