The new film “No Other Choice” really makes a meal of its title. We’re told, for instance, that the paper corporation that has employed You Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) for 25 years had no other choice but to lay him off and, later, that the entire field of paper manufacturing has no other choice but to radically streamline its workforce. Unfortunately for Man-soo’s peers, he decides that, in order to ensure his family’s future, he has no other choice but to kill his fellow applicants for one of the few remaining jobs.
Directed by South Korean master Park Chan-wook, “No Other Choice” is likely to draw comparisons to “Parasite,” which similarly appraised class differences in contemporary Korea — and similarly showcased a global auteur at the height of his powers. After an acclaimed premiere in Venice, “No Other Choice” screens at the New York Film Festival this week, followed by a stateside theatrical bow, via “Parasite” distributor Neon, at Christmas. But “Parasite” felt a few turns of the dial closer to reality: Where its story lands in its final moments is certainly unexpected, but it’s told with such pointillistic insight into human nature that it feels as if it might, somehow,
have happened.
“No Other Choice,” by contrast, leans into its absurdity; where “Parasite” was delicately wrought, this film moves with big, loping swings. Man-soo’s situation feels all too real — he’s overleveraged on a house he can’t bear to give up, constantly facing new demands for cash (his daughter’s cello teacher thinks she should upgrade to a more expensive instrument!), too old to be employable but too young to retire. But his response, a “Spy vs. Spy”-style plot carried out bumblingly, is so out there as to doubly emphasize just how hard up he is. Only someone who truly needed the cash would concoct a scheme to track down the rest of the applicant pool for an open position and kill them. Things are really bad out there! To make things worse, Man-soo is a poor marksman and an inept liar whose best idea for what to do with the bodies is to bury them in his own backyard.
This is far from the only film this year to use in extremis storytelling to make points about the world we’ve somehow found ourselves living in. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Ari Aster’s “Eddington” both depict individuals trying to fumble through a nightmare America defined both by rapacious violence and by a climate so hostile to truth that reality itself seems to be bending. (Anderson’s film updates the surreal 1980s California landscape of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland” to the present day.) And Yorgos Lanthimos’ forthcoming “Bugonia,” itself a remake of a South Korean film, uses a grandly strange story about a mentally ill man kidnapping a pharmaceutical executive he believes to be an alien to ask big questions about the growing wealth gap, corporate power and, ultimately, whether modern life is worth living.
These are very different directors, but all are at the highest echelon of filmmaking on the world stage — and all have a careerlong comfort with the strange. But “the strange” has previously been put to less explicitly political ends. Each of these directors emerges this year with stories that use the tools of oddity to directly address the state of the world, and it feels like a pointed acknowledgment that we’re in a new paradigm.
One can’t help rooting for Man-soo, even as winning the game he’s constructed will result in innocent people dying. Part of it, perhaps, is that Lee plays him with a grim understanding that he’s obviously in the wrong, but just out of options. (There’s the movie’s title again.) Part of it, too, is the audience’s walls-closing-in sense that they may be only a shift in economic trade winds from being in Man-soo’s position themselves. Perhaps this movie needed to be absurd for reasons beyond satirizing an out-of-control historical moment: Just telling it straight would be too difficult to bear.
