For eleven days each September, TIFF-goers line Toronto’s streets on a quest to devour an ungodly number of films. The festival is a test of stamina and willpower, encouraging festivalgoers to binge one screening after another. But some movies demand to be savoured. Park Chan-wook‘s latest, No Other Choice, is one such work. A whip-smart black comedy, driven by a knockout lead performance, No Other Choice is one of the crown jewels of this year’s TIFF slate.
Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) couldn’t ask for anything more from life. He’s married to the love of his life, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), and raising two young children. They live together in a spacious house with a lush garden and two loyal dogs.
When Man-soo’s employers at Solar Paper gift him some delicious high-end eel meat to share with his family, he sees it as a reward for his years of hard work — he was awarded the pulp Man of the Year award in 2019, after all. But that token of generosity was really an act of farewell, as Solar Paper lets him go in a round of corporate downsizing.
Finding a new job shouldn’t be an issue for someone with Man-soo’s experience. But the job market in the paper industry is shifting. There are few opportunities for men of his age with his particular set of skills.
As Man-soo holds out hope for the right job, his family finds themselves in dire financial straits. The threat of losing their home sends Mi-ri back into the workforce as the family downsizes and adapts to living on a shoestring budget.
The inability to land his dream job at Moon Paper sends Man-soo into an existential spiral. In an act of desperation, he takes fate into his own hands, enacting a murderous scheme to eliminate the contenders for the job he desires. He creates an ad for a fake paper company to draw out his competition and permanently remove them from Moon Paper’s callback list.
Park is riding a hot streak right now. His last two films, The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave, would be the crowning achievement in most filmmakers’ oeuvres, but with No Other Choice, Park shows he’s still operating at the height of his powers. What emerges is a devilishly entertaining social satire destined to adorn film nerds’ best of year lists.
No Other Choice delivers plenty of bang for your buck. It’s a taut and stylish thriller, a hilarious dark comedy, and a searing social commentary. Park packs this film with so many compelling concepts you could teach a college course on what it’s saying about capitalism, fragile masculinity, and our anxieties about AI and automation destabilizing the workforce.
With its unconventional tragicomic tone, this film lives and dies by the strength of its lead, and Lee delivers a career-defining performance. Actors go their entire careers without landing such a juicy and complex role.
Lee is magnetic as Man-soo, a swaggering fool who sees himself as an alpha and a killer while buckling at the first sign of pressure. He’s ambitious but lacks cunning and has a gift for making a bad situation worse. Most notably, Lee makes his unlikable protagonist’s motivations relatable, even if you can’t sympathize with his heinous actions.
Son provides the film’s counterbalance, as Mi-ri, Man-soo’s voice of reason. She knows exactly who she is, what she wants, and the best way to get it. Mi-ri, the pragmatist, is willing to ride the tides of change. For all of Man-soo’s plotting and scheming, it falls to Mi-ri to take their family’s fate into her hands.
Much of this film plays with the concept of manhood. Particularly, how men struggle to define themselves as gender roles evolve and women claim more self-agency. Park mines humour and pathos digging into the fragility of the male ego. Man-soo, terrified by his own inadequacy, sows chaos around him to preserve a flattering illusion of himself.
No Other Choice flamboyantly skewers our obsequious relationship with capitalism. Park calls out a soulless and punishing system that chews up and discards its workforce with zero empathy. The cruel irony is how the system grooms the workforce to be architects of their own demise by dangling the promise of privilege and status like a carrot on a stick. It’s inevitable that once someone gets a taste of the sweet life they will do anything to maintain it. In Man-soo’s case, that means turning his job hunt into something out of the Hunger Games.
