Headhunters: "No Other Choice"

The new Park Chan-wook thriller No Other Choice is notable as a further development in East-West cinematic relations: it finds the director and his now-regular Canadian collaborator Don McKellar adapting the US author Donald E. Westlake's bloody job-market satire The Ax in ways that reflect local Korean customs while also chiming with international cinemagoers whose day jobs are threatened by the AI the powers-that-be are presently pushing down our throats. It's teachable in how it sets up the entire basis of its two hour twenty minute plot in two early sequences. Park opens with a portrait of a family: salaryman dad tending a barbecue on the rolling lawn outside his expensive-looking home, his wife delighting in the chi-chi shoes he's bought for her, two model children rhyming with the family's two adorable golden retrievers. Early autumn leaves confetti over a sunkissed scene of bliss that will never quite be the same again; when we return to it late on - Park remaining, as ever, a stickler for evocative visual symmetries - it will be pissing it down with rain, one of those children will have been exposed as a delinquent, and dad will have buried a corpse under that lawn. Sequence two is a study of a workplace characterised by threat above all else: heavy machinery encouraged to operate at giddying fairground speed in the pursuit of greater productivity and profits, perishable men in overalls - the most vulnerable part of the whole enterprise - standing round below, oblivious to the fact they're in the process of being laid off by this paper factory's American owners. You immediately know why Lee Byung-hun's just-fired Yoo Man-su embarks upon a kill-crazy rampage in a bid to protect the lifestyle (and, just perhaps, the people) he loves; cause, effect and stakes are all established inside ten minutes.

Getting the plot out of the way allows Park to start having fun; indeed, there are long stretches in No Other Choice where you may be persuaded that no-one in world cinema is currently having more fun doing their job than Park Chan-wook. After the romantic agonies of 2022's Decision to Leave, the new film is baroque in a different, distinct way: it's a deluxe snakes-and-ladders board, and this filmmaker is moving all the pieces around. Initially, there is humiliation and debasement, as Man-su tries, with little success, to re-enter the job market, only to see less worthy individuals promoted in his place. (Again, Park puts all this on screen with admirable economy: often it requires one scene, and sometimes merely one gesture, to set these rat bastards up.) Then there begins the blackly comic revenge, as Man-su adopts murder as his new nine-to-five, identifying and taking out all those who might now stand between himself and gainful employment. (Becoming, in effect, his own kind of headhunter.) In these setpieces, Park seems to have metabolised Frank Tashlin's live-action cartoons and many, many miles of comic strip, the better to tell this story in predominantly visual fashion. Take Man-su's plan to brain one rival using a pot plant dropped from the roof above: the pot plants get bigger and bigger, the weightiest among them drips water all over the protagonist's head and face, and it never gets dropped anyway because Man-su is interrupted, at his fullest extension, by the plants' greenfingered keeper, a disapproving old woman with a hall-of-fame disapproving old woman face. 

At times like these, we seem to be watching a high-functioning filmmaker amusing himself, making thrillers for the hell of it. Park cannot shoot two characters walking through the woods without introducing a third party blundering through the back of frame; he converts the humdrum sight of a car reversing out of a parking spot into a symphony of crunched gears; and he pulls off something both mischievous and mysterious with the idea of an apple tree planted in a fertiliser bed of human carcass and stolen iPhones. (You fear for the fruit, while also wondering whether this is just an elaborate dad gag involving the word apple.) It's all (just about) related to the plot; still, very few filmmakers would fill in this plot like this. Park, too, has no other choice: he's impelled to fashion rich, textured images, to set images atop images, or images within images, as when Man-su's wife (Son Ye-jin) Facetimes her husband at the exact moment a stranger is sucking the poison from a snakebite on his calf. (Again, it has something to do with the plot; it also confirms a suspicion, born while watching Decision to Leave, that no-one has thought more extensively and more rewardingly than Park about how to integrate cellphone technology into our movies.) No other filmmaker currently working is more committed to giving their audience more for their money on a frame-by-frame basis - I'm excluding James Cameron, currently trapped in a cycle (of his own making) of giving us more of the same - but the risk is that a film like this becomes clotted, that the mechanisms of the thriller get bunged up with such ebullient imagemaking. You will, in short, see many more streamlined thrillers in 2026. (Why, there's a new Jason Statham vehicle out this very Friday.)

There are points where No Other Choice begins to seem farcical, somewhat overblown: the first assassination sequence, set to deafening rock music, climaxes in three squabbling characters simultaneously reaching for the gun that's tumbled under a sideboard. (And also yields the image that best encapsulates Park's millefeuille of imagery: our assassin is wearing a plastic glove under a regular glove, with an oven glove on top of that.) At other times, it can seem surfacey, a mere doodle, where Decision to Leave layered up the mysteries of human desire. Yet this narrative does wind its way towards landing a serious and substantial point: Man-su finds out - the hard way - that those he's setting out to slaughter are really not so unlike him, being sadsacks and drunkards, unreliable providers who've spent much of their working lives being screwed over by a system that does not give a shit. If they banded together - as they threaten to in places - they could help each other out, whether to form a support group or the union we hear being discussed in the opening moments. But capitalism - with its mechanisms of need and greed - has conspired to set them against one another; these men end up as divided as Korea itself, or the US, or indeed the UK. The title is internalised rhetoric, passed down from management to labour along with the pink slip and the P45: you can, it seems, remove the man from the system, but you can only take the system out of the man in the same way you can extract a rotten wisdom tooth - with much effort and pain, and possibly a large pair of pliers. That's still quite a lot to pull out of a night at the movies, and it stems from the legibility of these images, both in terms of their framing (cf: one painterly shot of a curving, leaf-strewn path leading down to a getaway car) and in the narrative information Park has to impart to carry this twisted tale from A to B. No Other Choice probably won't linger as long in the mind as Decision to Leave, but it's a hell of a lot of fun while it lasts: a filmmaker operating close to the peak of his storytelling powers, elbowing his way back into our consciousness with a well-constructed, superlatively illustrated joke.

No Other Choice is now playing in selected cinemas.