Job Security
By Adam Nayman
New York Film Festival 2025:
No Other Choice
Dir. Park Chan-wook, South Korea, NEON
Park Chan-wook builds better mousetraps than any director since Lars von Trier. His movies are gleaming, spring-loaded contraptions, designed to ensnare and brutalize viewers while incrementally glad-handing them towards climax. This is not necessarily meant as a put-down. At his best, Park produces the platonic ideal of high-end, soft-core torture porn—that old millennial stalking horse heroically mounted by academics and admen alike.
The critical argument that enterprising Bush-era grindhouse proprietors like James Wan and Eli Roth were secretly garnishing their pulled-pork horrors with sociological insight was pretty hard to swallow (Roth’s reheated leftovers are especially nauseating). Still, it would seem that Park, a former film critic and philosophy major whose transnational ascent was lubricated by a competition slot at Cannes for Oldboy in 2004—and public approbation from omnivorous American trash panda Quentin Tarantino—was “up to something” from the start. The live octopus so memorably masticated onscreen by Choi Min-sik in Oldboy was a potent, slippery symbol of extremity, for both the film’s micromanaging bad guy and his director (the movie is, if nothing else, a pretty funny joke about the need to provide a star performer with motivation). The single, pristine tear dripping down the cheek of Lee Young-ae at the end of the vigilante-opera Lady Vengeance (2005) meanwhile, served as a clever, melancholy money shot in a movie awash in viciously spilled bodily fluid. Never mind that the white frosting on the heroine’s face as she communes with her daughter beneath a sugary dusting of snow portrays a filmmaker having his cake and eating it too.
Park’s appetites for destruction and catharsis are bottomless, and his movies have generally gotten heavier as a result. If Bong Joon-ho’s calling card is a serene velocity—a weightlessness attributable to both the swiftness of his storytelling and his embrace, more in English-language features, of both visible and invisible CGI—Park deals in a fleshy, tactile, luxurious sort of bloat. He’s also more inclined towards eroticism than Bong—duly blood-soaked in the Zola-inflected vampire riff Thirst and served more-or-less straight up in The Handmaiden, still his best feature. That film was a beautifully brocaded period piece staging a steamy Meet Cute between a pair of Ladies Vengeant: one Korean, one Japanese, and both aroused by the prospects of fucking one another whilst also fucking over a bitter, misogynistic aristocrat. (In a nice bit of self-citation, Park deployed another octopus, bigger than its compatriot in Oldboy, with the implication being that this one got to eat people.)
In this context of unbound luridness, the most interesting thing about 2022’s Decision to Leave was its relative restraint in unspooling its convoluted tale of manipulation and murder, complete with insomniac cop and a Catherine Trammell-ish femme fatale. Here, Park cultivated—and nailed—a swoony cosmic fatalism under the sign of Alfred Hitchcock, with a climax that wandered off in the direction of Hiroshi Teshigahara. The film was received as a masterpiece, a claim staked less by its well-worn plot tropes than a dazzling array of layered, multi-planar framings and consistent, sophisticated integration of digital technologies and textures into the mise-en-scène (including truly inspired use of iPhone translation apps). On a formal level, Decision to Leave was the work of a master, and the same goes for Park’s follow-up, No Other Choice, a bleak, zeitgeist-surfing comedy about a laid-off manufacturer seething and coping over the fact of his own redundancy. The script is derived (quite fascinatingly) from a 1997 novel by American crime-fiction maestro Donald Westlake; the adaptation took four writers (including Don McKellar), but the style feels singular. Whatever else one can say about No Other Choice, it is a formidable and frequently gobsmacking exercise in craft; at times, it’s as if Park and his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung are ticking off some kind of joint bucket list when it comes to eccentric and unexpected camera placements. Gone is the fluid, intuitive image-making of Decision to Leave, which, even in its most virtuosic moments, felt synced to the procedural creep of the story; in its place is an aesthetic of pure, exultant discombobulation, a plunge into the subjectivity of a character who, for all his meticulous planning, has no idea what he’s doing.
The tension between intelligent premeditation and blood-simple execution is a noir standard, and the calculated messiness of No Other Choice—exacerbated by Park’s grateful re-embrace of the sort of gruesome, possibly gratuitous details that made him an art-house brand-name to begin with—begs the sort of indulgence that its maker’s fans have been trained to give. Between its compositional dynamism and picaresque sensibility, the film is an auteur work to the core; it’s also—at least for me—enervating in ways that don’t so much undermine the stylistic pyrotechnics as indicate they’re the source of the problem.
Mansu (Lee Byung-hun) is a prosperous upper-middle-manager who knows enough not to take his success for granted. On the contrary, he proudly tells his family how much he loves them (his preferred ritual is the collective “one minute hug”) and how lucky they are to live in a bucolic mini-mansion on the edge of the city. The house is a family heirloom that Mansu nevertheless takes pride in owning outright; seen through Kim’s lens brightly, bathed in sunlight, the environs are positively Edenic. Paradise is only there to be lost: despite his sterling track record as a paper-maker—including a 2019 citation as “Pulp Man of the Year”—Mansu is downsized in the wake of his company’s acquisition by an American conglomerate. His pleas for clemency fall on deaf ears, even when he literally comes crawling back; overnight, his sense of self gets drained along with his bank account. A visit to a support group for the newly unemployed yields not solidarity but solipsism; the session’s mantra, “I am a good person,” sells an idea of virtue-as-its-own-reward that Mansu isn’t buying.
The scenario of a successful breadwinner suddenly forced to subsist on humble pie is familiar from a number of 21st-century dramas, including Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, from which No Other Choice borrows rather liberally, including a crucial subplot about Mansu’s cello prodigy daughter, whose music lessons are pretty much the only regular expenditure not on the chopping block. In an effort to stanch the bleeding, Mansu’s wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), resolves to go back to work as a dental hygienist; she’s less worried about money than possibility her teetotaling husband will start drinking again.
Mansu’s first effort to pick himself up off the canvas is rebuffed during a disastrous job interview where the universe appears to be mocking him to his face; the same sunlight that dappled his household now conspires blinds him when magnified, laser-like, through the steel-and-glass-facade of an office building. Time, then for Plan B: preemptively identifying any and all proximate paper men more hirable than himself and murdering them before they can apply for the one promising job being advertised online.
This is a good, resonant set-up, and in The Axe it manifests as a lean, mean satire of the late-capitalist mentality by which success can only come at the expense of somebody else. “[I have to kill] in self-defense, really, confides Westlake’s narrator. “In defense of my family, my life, my mortgage, my future, myself…my life.” As in his marvelous screenplay for The Stepfather (1987), Westlake maps out a dramatic space whereby an everyman’s homicidal impulses are plausibly able to foment unnoticed: the killer inside takes pains to remain hidden. No Other Choice takes the material in a different direction—over the top, so that Mansu is a bungler succeeding by way of blind luck. His assassination attempts end up drawing attention to themselves, at first from random bystanders—an older lady wondering why there’s a man in her rooftop garden aiming a heavy flowerpot at somebody 15 feet down on the ground—and then associates of the victims themselves. Instead of a sinister, complicitous character study à la Westlake, Park cultivates a slapstick chaos that wears down its hapless perpetrator and the audience at roughly the same rate—there’s nothing for the viewer to do but giggle at the imaginative nastiness of the staging and wait out the inevitability of Mansu’s quest, with its satirical implication that each time he finishes off another “paper man,” he’s killing (and, very sloppily, burying) a part of himself.
There is, of course, no accounting for taste—or tastelessness—and No Other Choice keeps coming up with flavorful variations on sadism; a late set-piece involving a character forced into choking on his own vomit makes the strongest bid for Park’s all-time atrocity exhibition. On the terms that the movie sets for itself as a broad, carnivalesque farce, all of this works fine—elevated by Lee’s superbly modulated performance, all flop sweat, flailing limbs and rictus grins—and yet despite Park’s confidence in mixing together goofy and doomy tones (another point of comparison with Bong, who does it better), he doesn’t shape the material in a way that yields real feeling—or terror. Park’s reputation as the sort of hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners genre director who’s willing to drag viewers out of their comfort zones—to really go there, as in the devastating reverse-Oedipal punchline of Oldboy or the Death Wish on the Orient Express wind-up of Lady Vengeance, with its darkly funny image of grieving parents lining up to get their licks in with a child murderer—belies the patness of this movie’s ironies. Mansu’s victims are almost all grotesques (a lazy strategy for ensuring audience identification), and while the violence does come home insofar as he stashes corpses in the backyard, our expectations are never violated the way they are in, say, Kill List, also about a cash-strapped predator rationalizing his actions as a form of self-defense but which arrives in a considerably more visceral place, and in roughly two thirds of the running time.
To Park’s credit, he saves his most arresting—and suggestive—images for the coda, which, though a long time coming, are basically worth it—an ecstatic communion between Man(su) and Machine that recasts the narrative as Darwinian speculative fiction about what has to be eradicated (humanity) in a brave new world. (The title of Park’s funniest and most underrated movie comes to mind, even if indirectly: I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK.) At the same time, though, pinning a movie about the wages of human frailty on a tableau of total automation finally comes off as, if not facile, exactly, then easier than it should be—the same charge that could be levied at the conceptually similar closer in Eddington, with its promise that SolidGoldMagiKarp is watching. Park’s anxieties about the socioeconomic consequences and spiritual drag of a world caught between artificial intelligence and the hand of the market are real and timely; that his deluxe cautionary fable plays itself like a movie on some kamikaze setting of autopilot is its own strange paradox.