No Other Choice (15)
Directed by Park Chan-wook
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

SOUTH KOREAN filmmaker Park Chan-wook returns with something completely different — a deliciously dark and wickedly clever satirical comedy that takes a swing at the corporate rat race and the looming evils of AI technology.

It is based on Donald E Westlake’s novel The Ax which Park, who co-wrote the script with Lee Kyoung-mi and Don McKellar, set in South Korea instead of the US. It follows Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a father of two and a loyal company man who has been working at the same paper firm for the last 25 years. When it is bought out by a US corporation which decides to reduce the workforce, he is suddenly made redundant which completely upends his world. 

Up to that point he has been living a lavish life with his wife, two children and their two dogs at his spacious childhood home. Finding himself unemployed and unable to find a job, he nevertheless refuses to downsize and lead a more affordable existence due to his selfish, capitalist middle-class entitlement. Instead he identifies his main competitors in his former workplace and decides to kill them off one by one, thereby ensuring that he is rehired by his former employer. 

It is a surreal twist which Byung-hun makes plausible due to his earnest and believable performance as the hapless Man-su, and great pains are taken to make everything relatable that happens to this ordinary man. Even the fact that he loses his self-worth and masculine identity after becoming unemployed. His 25 years of loyalty and hard work aren’t valued and his experience and skills are expendable. So who is he without his job?

And when there is his young daughter, a prodigy cellist, who punishes her father by refusing to play for him. She requires a more experienced and expensive teacher if she is to reach her full potential, but they cannot afford her lessons. 

Although not as shocking or as provocative as Park’s Oldboy and The Handmaiden, this is still full of surprises and some awe. The ending is very much a case of “be careful what you wish for” as it concludes on a very insightful and thought-provoking note that pertains especially to the perils of AI taking over people’s jobs. 

Extremely intense at times, outrageous, and yet wonderfully entertaining, this could prove another Park classic. 

In cinemas January 23