Oldboy and The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook has premiered a “bleakly hilarious” comedy about economic anxiety at the Venice Film Festival, and it could be a huge international hit.
In 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to awestruck acclaim, and went onto be an Oscar-winning international hit. No Other Choice could be this year’s equivalent. The latest masterpiece from Park Chan-wook, who directed Oldboy (2003) and co-produced Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013), it’s another deliriously entertaining and continually surprising South Korean film which rails against today’s economic realities, and which boasts an imaginatively staged death or two. Also, both films revolve around a gorgeous family home.
The house in question is owned by You Man-su, played by Lee Byung-hun (the Front Man in Squid Game). He was born there, and as an adult he dedicated himself to buying and restoring it, so now it’s a perfect woodland home for him, his loving wife (Son Ye-jin), and their two children. “You know what I think now,” he muses at the opening of the film, as he barbecues an eel in the blossom-filled front garden. “I’ve got it all.” Uh oh.
After painting this cheekily ominous picture of domestic bliss, Park wastes no time in shredding it. Man-su has worked in the same paper factory for 25 years, and is proud to have won a “pulp man of the year” award, so he is shocked when the factory’s new American owners start cutting jobs, his included. The film then offers a heartrending, but bleakly hilarious account of the humiliation of being downsized. Man-su and his former colleagues are encouraged to sit in a circle, chanting self-affirmation slogans while tapping their temples. And when he asks for an afternoon off his temporary shelf-stacking job so that he can attend an interview, he is stripped of his boilersuit, and has to leave the building in his underwear.
A year later, the family is forced to make painful economies: no more Netflix! In a further three months, they will have to sell their cherished house to a neighbour they loathe. It’s at this point that Man-su forms a desperate plan. If he murders the person who has the job he wants, and murders everyone in the area who might be qualified for the same job, then his worries will be over. But he hasn’t realised what a messy and complicated business murder can be. And he hasn’t realised that, as fellow “pulp men”, his targets will be uncomfortably similar to him. Essentially, he will be trying to kill different versions of himself.
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