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Yoo Man-su has it all. A loving family, two adorable dogs, ownership of his beautiful home, and a career of 25 years that he takes great pride in.
But, in Oldboy director Park Chan-wook's latest black comedy thriller No Other Choice, it only takes a few seconds to rip it all away. Man-su's beloved career evaporates when the new American owners of his paper factory lay him off. After an attempt to break back into the industry falls excruciatingly flat when a nervy Man-su bombs an interview, he decides his only path forward is to stage a fake job opening for a paper company, then kill off the competition one by one. Easy, right?
Well, wrong. Man-su quickly discovers murder is not an easy task – not just morally, but logistically, too – and his madcap quest to return to the paper industry at all costs sets him on a path that threatens to obliterate him and his family.
Sympathy for the devil
No Other Choice is arriving decades into director Park's career, but the legendary filmmaker – the mind behind instant classics like The Handmaiden, the Vengeance Trilogy, and Decision to Leave – has had his sights set on an adaptation of Donald Westlake's The Ax for almost as long.
"It's been 20 years since I first read the novel and decided that I wanted to adapt it, but I have actually been doing the work of the adaptation for around 16 years," director Park tells us when we meet with him and star Lee Byung-hun at London Film Festival. "And, I initially wanted it to be an English-language film in accordance with the original novel, but none of the studios offered the level of budget that I wanted for the project. And that's when I thought to myself, 'Why can't I just make this into a Korean film?' And ever since that thought occurred to me, everything has very quickly developed, and, after that, I've been able to cast amazing actors like Lee Byung-hun."
Lee, who is perhaps most recognizable as Squid Game's villainous Front Man, stars as the hapless Man-su. This ostensible family man starts out flawed but sympathetic, floundering at the thought of losing his home, but aghast at the concept of downsizing to an apartment. Luckily, Man-su's wife, Son Ye-jin's Miri, proves more pragmatic. She makes the difficult decision to temporarily rehome their dogs – to the agony of their youngest daughter – and even cancels Netflix, to the disdain of their son. Just like Man-su can't comprehend finding work outside of the paper industry, he also can't comprehend any significant lifestyle changes. He even struggles with Miri working as a dental assistant, increasingly paranoid that she might be having an affair with her boss, and convinced that, as the man of the house, it's his job to provide for his family.
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Man-su's murderous scheming does even more to fracture this already fragile family, however, as his escapades take him away from the loved ones that need him in pursuit of a goal we're always painfully aware is absurd. Despite this, the film accomplishes a fine balancing act of making Man-su sympathetic, even though he has much in common with his victims – who themselves are former paper workers who have fallen on hard times – and is obliviously turning the ruthless competition of job-hunting under capitalism into a literal bloodbath.
"One characteristic of this story is that when you're typically eliminating and murdering somebody in the film, the audience follows the emotions of the protagonists," Lee tells us. "There are strong themes of revenge in those types of stories, so the audience is typically cheering on the protagonist, supporting them, really wishing that they'll get rid of and eradicate this other person.
"However, here in this film, Man-su is eliminating people that he has no prior relationship with. In fact, when he closely observes them and gets to know them, he even empathizes with them and has a lot of sympathy with them, which makes it really harder for him to act upon and execute his plans following his decision," he explains. "So, the audience could be following Man-su, cheering him on, and then all of a sudden depart from him, and just observe him from far away at a distance, which is quite an unusual, odd experience for the audience. So, then they can go back to him and then resonate and sympathize with him, and then again, jump out and observe him from further away. And the film is a repetition of that. However, for me as the actor playing Man-su, I was always on his side cheering him on."
Make 'em laugh
On paper, No Other Choice might sound like a deeply serious thriller, then. But, like many of director Park's films, pitch-black humor abounds – some critics have even compared Man-su's antics to Looney Tunes. While Lee is indeed giving a physically comical performance, he never viewed his role as slapstick.
"For me, honestly, Man-su is an ordinary man facing an extreme situation, leading him to make very extreme decisions as well," Lee tells us. "And in this process of acting upon his extreme decisions, he undergoes many changes psychologically and emotionally, ultimately leading up to his self-destructive situation. So, during this journey, for me, I gave my total focus on all the changes in his emotions that he goes through, and that was what I put my most thought and efforts into.
"And, even after I'd finished the film, I never considered that I was doing slapstick comedy in any way," he continues. "When we went to Venice and Toronto, and various journalists and critics were reviewing it as such, I was like, 'Okay, yeah, I can see why that would appear as being a slapstick comedy.' When you look at the protagonist closely, he's actually in a very desperate situation, falling on hard times. However, if you span out… I can see why it will look funny. And I think that's really the appeal of this film."
Lee's performance is an effortless, tonally perfect fit for this hilarious dark satire, so it might not come as a surprise to discover that this is not his and director Park's first collaboration. The duo first worked together on 2000's Joint Security Area, a poignant procedural in which Lee plays a South Korean soldier who befriends two guards on the opposite side of the Demilitarized Zone, and again on the short film Cut, part of the horror anthology Three… Extremes, which stars Lee as a successful film director who endures a nightmarish evening at the violent mercy of one of his extras.
"I guess if you look at it in terms of years that have passed in our careers, it has been many years since we've worked together," Park says. "But over those years, we've always stayed friends and caught up quite often. So, it didn't feel that long to me. In fact, I was surprised to find out that it's been so long since we'd last worked together, so it didn't feel like a lot of time had passed at all."
With No Other Choice receiving near-universal critical acclaim, here's hoping another collaboration comes sooner rather than later.
No Other Choice is in US theaters now and UK cinemas from January 23. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
