There’s a specific cruelty in doing all the pieces proper and nonetheless find yourself dropping. You’re employed arduous, you climb the ladder, you purchase the home, you present for your loved ones. After which at some point, somebody you’ve by no means met decides you’re expendable. Park Chan-wook‘s No Different Selection (Korean: 어쩔수가없다) understands that cruelty intimately. Primarily based on Donald Westlake‘s novel The Ax, the movie transplants an American story of financial collapse to South Korea and finds one thing common within the rage of a person who performed by all the principles and received screwed anyway.
Lee Byung-hun has been certainly one of South Korea’s most dependable actors for many years, however this is perhaps his most interesting work but. On this movie, he performs Yoo Man-su, an award-winning veteran worker of Photo voltaic Paper, a papermaking firm the place he’s climbed the ladder by years of dedication. Man-su has all of it: good wage, his childhood house bought and paid for, a spouse Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), a teenage stepson Si-one, a younger daughter Ri-one who’s a cello prodigy, two canine. It’s the sort of snug middle-class life that feels earned, deserved. After which Individuals purchase out Photo voltaic Paper and fireplace him together with dozens of others.
A Profession-Finest Efficiency
Lee doesn’t telegraph Man-su’s devastation in a showy, explosive means. As an alternative, it’s quieter than that, extra insidious even. He comes house, tells his household that he’s among the many manufacturing line that the brand new possession decides to chop, and vows to renew papermaking inside three months. It’s the sort of promise a person makes when he nonetheless believes the system will work for him if he simply tries arduous sufficient.
13 months later, he’s doing low-paying retail work. His household has reduce spending all over the place. They’ve given away the canine. His daughter’s instructor needs her in superior cello lessons they’ll’t afford. The mortgage is overdue. Man-su’s childhood house (the factor he labored his complete life to reclaim) is about to be offered to the dad and mom of his stepson’s greatest buddy. The humiliation is full.
Lee performs all of this with a sort of coiled pressure that makes you nervous even in quiet scenes. There’s a second early on the place Man-su suffers a toothache and ignores it, and you may see in Lee’s face that he’s ignoring extra than simply bodily ache. He’s ignoring actuality. He’s ignoring the truth that the life he constructed is collapsing. And when he lastly decides to take drastic motion, when he retrieves his father’s Vietnam Battle gun, Lee makes you perceive precisely how an honest man convinces himself that excessive measures are justified. It’s a efficiency that’s very arduous to disregard.
Park Chan-wook Does Class Warfare
Park Chan-wook adapting Donald Westlake’s The Ax shouldn’t work in addition to it does. Westlake’s novel options upstate New York, and the specifics of American company tradition inform the story. However Park, working with co-writers Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye, transplants the fabric to South Korea and finds one thing common in Man-su’s desperation. The movie works as a satirical black comedy that steadily stops feeling like fiction and begins turning into documentary-like in its resonance immediately.
Job insecurity and the erosion of middle-class stability aren’t summary ideas in 2025. They’re lived-in realities for hundreds of thousands of individuals globally. Automation displaces staff, outsourcing kills native industries. Company buyouts intestine corporations and go away workers scrambling. Man-su’s story isn’t excessive; it’s simply sincere. He’s not some unhinged psychopath. Quite the opposite, he’s a person who performed by the principles his whole life and received screwed anyway. Park understands this, and he movies Man-su’s descent not as a thriller however as a procedural. Man-su identifies his competitors for the few remaining papermaking jobs (Beom-mo performed by Lee Sung-min, and Si-jo performed by Cha Seung-won) and the movie follows his more and more determined makes an attempt to safe his future by any means needed.
Alternatively, the company buyout by Individuals isn’t a delicate symbolism. Removed from it, it’s Park making some extent about international capital and the parable of the American Dream. Native industries don’t simply fail; they’re consumed by multinational firms that reply to shareholders, not staff. Man-su labored for many years to safe his place on the planet, and it took one boardroom resolution to erase all of that. The movie asks: what do you do when the system that promised stability reveals itself to be a lie?
Working Inside the Margins of Choicelessness
It’s tempting to match No Different Selection to Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, and the comparability holds weight. Each movies study what occurs when individuals are pushed to the margins of society, pressured to function inside methods that had been by no means designed to incorporate them. However the place the Kim household in Parasite resorts to deception and leeching, parasitically infiltrating a rich family by solid credentials and elaborate cons; Man-su goes additional, diving headfirst into blood. Bong’s household schemes to outlive, every member enjoying a task in a collective hustle that’s nearly theatrical in its coordination. Park’s protagonist operates alone, methodically eliminating competitors to reclaim what he believes rightfully must be his. The Kims are opportunists. Man-su is one thing darker: a real believer within the system whom the identical system has betrayed.
Each movies, although, ask the identical query: when the system presents you no official path ahead, how far will you go? The distinction is within the reply, and in what that reply reveals about class consciousness. The Kims need in. They’re not serious about dismantling the system and even questioning it. They simply need a piece of the pie, they usually’re prepared to lie, manipulate, and betray one another to get it. There’s a scrappy, nearly comedic vitality to their desperation.
On the flip aspect, Man-su needs one thing else solely: revenge disguised as justice, validation disguised as employment. He’s not attempting to infiltrate the higher class. He’s attempting to reclaim his place within the center class, that promised land of stability that was speculated to be his reward for enjoying by the principles. His violence isn’t opportunistic. It’s ideological.
What makes each movies so unsettling is that they perceive desperation doesn’t excuse monstrosity, however in addition they perceive why that desperation exists within the first place. Whereas Parasite reveals you the collapse of the con, No Different Selection reveals you what occurs when the con was by no means the system failing you—it was believing within the system in any respect.
Masculinity in Freefall
One of many issues I discovered fascinating in No Different Selection is its exploration of Man-su’s ethical decline. Right here, the movie ties it on to his sense of masculinity. He’s the supplier, the pinnacle of family, the person who purchased again his childhood house. When he loses his job, he doesn’t simply lose revenue. He loses his id.
In the meantime, his spouse Mi-ri begins working as a dental assistant for a suave dentist named Jin-ho (Yoo Yeon-seok). Man-su watches her at a costumed dance get together, late as a result of he was burying proof, and sees her dancing with Jin-ho. The jealousy and rage that flood his face aren’t nearly potential infidelity. They’re about feeling changed, out of date, emasculated.
This faucets into one thing uncomfortably actual. Conventional gender roles are being questioned and dismantled, and for males who constructed their identities round being suppliers, that shift can really feel like annihilation. Man-su doesn’t know how you can be a person if he’s not working, not offering. So he does the one factor that makes him really feel highly effective once more: he takes management in probably the most excessive means doable. Park doesn’t excuse this. He doesn’t glorify it. However he understands it, and that understanding makes the movie extra disturbing than any quantity of graphic violence may.
Park’s Signature Fashion in Service of One thing New
Park has made a profession out of stylized violence and ethical ambiguity. Oldboy, Girl Vengeance, The Handmaiden: these are movies the place revenge, want, and betrayal collide in operatic style. No Different Selection has all of Park’s logos (the meticulous framing, the darkish humor, the sudden eruptions of brutality). But it surely’s wielded in service of one thing nearer to documentary than fantasy.
Issues go mistaken for Man-su. His plans unravel in messy, chaotic ways in which really feel deeply un-cinematic in comparison with how Park normally operates. That’s the purpose. Determined acts aren’t clear, in any case. They don’t resolve issues; they create new ones. Every alternative Man-su makes complicates his life additional, entangling him in penalties he by no means anticipated.
The violence right here isn’t cathartic. It’s exhausting. By the top, Man-su has secured what he wished: the job, the house, his household intact. From the skin, he’s received. However probably the most highly effective photographs within the movie (Man-su celebrating alone in a contemporary paper mill run by machines as a substitute of staff) undercuts any sense of triumph. He’s secured his place in an trade that’s already out of date. He’s sacrificed all the pieces for nothing.
Cranking Ethical Ambiguity As much as Eleven
Park refuses to make No Different Selection a easy morality story. Is Man-su a sufferer of an unforgiving system or a person who misplaced all ethical grounding? The reply is each, and that’s what makes the movie so unsettling. You perceive why Man-su does what he does. The movie by no means asks you to condone it, but it surely asks you to take a seat with the uncomfortable fact that desperation can push odd folks to extraordinary extremes.
There’s a scene the place Man-su’s stepson Si-one witnesses one thing he shouldn’t. Si-one tells his mom. Mi-ri has to make an unimaginable alternative about what to do with that data. These aren’t evil folks. They’re folks making unimaginable decisions in an unimaginable scenario. Even so, the movie doesn’t let anybody off the hook: not Man-su for his actions, not the system that pushed him there, not the viewers for understanding his logic.
This ethical ambiguity feels particularly related immediately. We’re dwelling by crises—local weather change, financial inequality, political polarization—the place questions of justice, privilege, and accountability don’t have any simple solutions. No Different Selection faucets into that uncertainty. It’s a movie a few man who breaks each rule and nonetheless finally ends up with nothing that issues.
The Supporting Forged and Park’s Craft
Son Ye-jin as Mi-ri does robust work as a lady attempting to carry her household collectively whereas her husband spirals. She’s not a passive sufferer; she makes her personal compromises, begins her personal life. When she and Man-su accuse one another of infidelity earlier than reconciling, it’s one of many few moments the place their marriage seems like an precise partnership relatively than a transaction.
The movie additionally offers Lee Sung-min and Cha Seung-won, the opposite unemployed papermakers competing for a similar scarce jobs, sufficient dimension that you just see them as folks, not obstacles. Beom-mo is an unemployed drunk whose spouse has given up on him. Si-jo sells sneakers and talks about his younger daughter. They’re males in the identical determined scenario as Man-su, simply attempting to outlive. Park Hee-soon‘s Seon-chul rounds out the solid as a social media influencer who landed the job Man-su wished.
Cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung and composer Jo Yeong-wook, each frequent Park collaborators, do glorious work. The movie appears to be like crisp and trendy, which makes the darker turns really feel extra jarring. Jo’s rating, restrained more often than not, lets scenes breathe with out telegraphing emotion.
If the movie has a weak point, it’s that a few of the subplots really feel underdeveloped. Si-one’s theft storyline together with his buddy Geon-ho, whereas thematically related (children studying to cheat the system as a result of they see adults doing it), doesn’t combine as easily because it may. The movie units up Ri-one’s cello prodigy arc with out a lot payoff. These are minor complaints in a movie that in any other case fires on all cylinders, however they’re value noting.
‘No Different Selection’: Why It Issues Now
No Different Selection is the sort of movie that feels ripped from immediately’s headlines, regardless that it’s primarily based on a novel from 1997. The anxieties it explores—job loss, financial displacement, the collapse of the center class—haven’t gone away; they’ve gotten worse. Park Chan-wook has made a movie that’s darkly humorous, viscerally uncomfortable, and disturbingly prescient, mixing satire and despair together with his trademark precision.
And in it, Lee Byung-hun delivers one of many yr’s greatest performances, enjoying a person who thinks he has no different alternative and makes all of the mistaken ones anyway.
A self-described cinephile who can’t cease speaking—and writing—about movies. Paul additionally moonlights as ghostwriter and editor for just a few memoirs. He at present resides within the Philippines.