Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away. That’s one of the cold, familiar truths in Park Chan-wook’s cruelly, ostentatiously comic “No Other Choice.” A modern-day freakout, the movie centers on a middle-class family man who comes with the usual fixings, including a loving wife, two cute kids and a prettily situated house. Outside, two golden pooches frolic, tucking into doghouses that will soon be vacated, along with our man’s dreams. In some stories, he might respond by crawling into a recliner and drifting into a fog of bitter disappointment. Instead, this model citizen gets creative, and the blood begins to spill.
“No Other Choice” is a brutal story for brutal times, one steeped in corrosive humor and delivered with Park’s customary flair. It’s based on Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel, “The Ax,” about a manager at a paper company who, after he is laid off — or “downsized,” to use the obnoxious euphemism — ends up taking matters into his own hands. (The book was also adapted into a 2005 film, “Le Couperet,” directed by Costa-Gavras.) In “No Other Choice,” the protagonist, Man-su (Lee Byung Hun), is abruptly let go after an American outfit buys the South Korean company where he has long worked. He helped his old company make a killing, to borrow an on-point business idiom, only to be summarily rendered redundant.
Adapted by Park and a handful of other writers, the story tracks Man-su from impotent stasis to flamboyant instability, from the security of his position at the paper company through his abrupt termination and the mounting desperation that follows. The story cranks up just as the new owners are taking over the company, where Man-su and others are seen milling about on the factory floor while keeping the enormous, deafening machinery running. Despite the fiery speech that he’s prepared to protest the new owners’ draconian reductions, he is soon cut loose from the firm where, he bleats, he has “slaved for 25 years.”
The company’s industrial production — from pulp to paper — serves as a sly metaphor for labor itself, if only because the final product invariably ends up in the trash. When Man-su walks the floor, the image of him amid the plant’s fearsome, relentlessly moving parts evokes Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 masterpiece, “Modern Times,” where his assembly-line character is sucked up into the very guts of the machine. In the decades since, other workers in movies (often in documentaries) have been chewed up and spit out by a rapacious economic system, including Michael Douglas’s unhinged Everyman in “Falling Down,” a former defense worker who rails about having protected America only to be lied to.
Man-su, by contrast, struggles to adjust to his new normal and find another job, while his wife, Miri (Son Yejin), economizes. Soon after he’s fired, he attends some kind of support group for out-of-work men, parroting ego-stroking affirmations and sitting in a circle that — as the camera looks down from above — echoes the machinery in his old company; the alienation of labor only begets further alienation. At another point, he ends up on his knees outside the bathroom at a different company, begging for a job. It’s a humiliating vision, one that Park, who tends to twist every deeply implanted knife, plays for uncomfortable humor. “We put our home for sale,” Man-su says about his family, adding that they have also “canceled Netflix.”
Punctuated by Park’s energetically swooping camerawork, these scenes serve as the bright, comic prelude to the queasy main course, in which Man-su pursues violently drastic measures. In desperation, he turns to murder, a decision (he feels he has no other choice) that finds him tracking down other men he sees as competitors. It’s almost shocking how quickly he resorts to extremes; largely it feels like a script-writing inevitability, one that doesn’t jibe with Man-su’s decency and soft, pleading eyes. Park digs into the space between Man-su’s gentleness and the ferocity of his actions, but the character’s complexities are best served by Lee’s sensitive, variegated performance, with its ebb and flow of warmth and boiling rage.
“No Other Choice” is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances. Both Lee and Son give their characters a depth of feeling that pierces through their outsize performances, their flapping mouths and wild eyes. Park loves extremes — his movies include “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden” — but in “No Other Choice,” his more hyperbolic flourishes drain the emotional pow out of a story that, at its best, can make you gasp in empathy amid the horror.
No Other Choice Rated R for gruesome violence. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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