‘No Other Choice’ review: Thriller combines jolts with economic anxiety

Professional setbacks can be opportunities in disguise: a chance to look inward, take stock and grow as a person. Or, if you’re the protagonist of Park Chan-wook’s bleakly comedic thriller, you can bypass all that and just kill your rivals. In today’s brutal job market, murder might be a smarter career move than networking.

“No Other Choice,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the International People’s Choice Award at Toronto, starts off all too familiarly. Man-su (Lee Byung-Hun) has been a model executive at Solar Paper for 25 years — he was once named “Pulp Man of the Year” — and has secured a comfortable middle-class life with his beautiful wife Miri (Son Yejin) and their two children. Barbecuing one day with the family, he takes in their gorgeous house, the one he grew up in that he managed to buy as an adult, and allows himself a moment to savor his good fortune.

Little does he know that providence is about to run out: Solar Paper is soon acquired by an American company and his job is terminated. Man-su vows to find meaningful work within three months but more than a year later, he’s still looking, falling dangerously behind on his mortgage payments.

If Park’s film begins as another lament for our layoff-laden modern world, the South Korean director soon introduces a sinister twist. Frustrated that he cannot land a comparable executive position in the cutthroat paper industry — and envious of a snide manager (Park Hee Son) at Moon Paper, a top rival firm — Man-su concocts a two-pronged plan. He aims to both kill the manager and also eliminate any possible competitors for the vacant position.

That requires Man-su to anonymously set up his own fake paper company, collecting résumés from other out-of-work executives. After evaluating which of these men has more impressive credentials than he does, he’ll plot their demise, thereby securing the cushy Moon Paper role for himself.

It’s a monstrous idea and also a clever one — not that Man-su and Park were the first to think of it. “No Other Choice” is based off late author Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax,” which was previously adapted by “Z” director Costa-Gavras. (Park dedicates his film to Costa-Gavras.) But Man-su, who has devoted his life to the careful cultivation of paper products while everyone else has gone digital, has an easier time setting his crime in motion than in executing it. Turns out, killing people is really difficult. Park stages Man-su’s homicide attempts as slapstick set pieces in which our clumsy antihero himself barely gets out alive.

Early in Park’s career, in films such as “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy,” he specialized in bloody genre fare, emerging as a stylish B-movie auteur. But with the lush 2016 erotic thriller “The Handmaiden” and 2022’s elegantly Hitchcockian “Decision to Leave,” Park has recently shown an interest in toying with the tony trappings of “prestige” pictures while remaining enamored with lurid pulp fiction.

Strikingly, “No Other Choice” plays like a melding of his different eras, once again diving into his characters’ rotten souls while flexing sumptuous craft and bitter commentary. But the tone is often more satiric than somber, Park highlighting Man-su’s foibles and insecurities. (An entire sequence has Man-su comically flailing to rip his wife’s undergarments off to prove that she’s having an affair with her boss.) “No Other Choice” is frequently sexy and mischievous, even when Man-su attracts the police’s suspicion as the bodies start piling up.

The film may initially present Man-su as a sympathetic family man trying to make ends meet, but Lee quickly subverts those sentiments once Man-su’s methodical process betrays no sense of remorse. Initially, this nondescript executive is ill-equipped at murder, but it’s not because he feels bad — it’s just that he needs more practice. Provocatively amoral, “No Other Choice” suggests that, like any job skill, killing simply requires a little dedication and initiative. The results speak for themselves. If anything, homicide isn’t just advantageous for Man-su professionally but also at home, unexpectedly strengthening his bond with Miri, a divorcée who has become accustomed to being a stay-at-home mom.

Park’s approach may be pleasingly shocking, but it isn’t always novel. “No Other Choice” bluntly depicts a contemporary workforce decimated by AI and cost-cutting, but its view of alienated labor and thwarted masculinity has roots in indelible works such as “Parasite” and “Breaking Bad.” And for all its dark comedy, the movie is most cutting when it moves away from the big set pieces and, instead, examines the small ways that employees lose their humanity to a capitalist system that’s out to destroy them. Like the trees cut down and pulverized to make Man-su’s beloved paper products, ultimately we’re all being fed into the shredder.