You could make a case for Park Chan-wook having the most absurdly varied CV of any living director. Coming to international attention in 2003 with cult classic revenge movie Oldboy, his oeuvre includes steamy psychological thriller Stoker, disturbing erotica The Handmaiden and romantic neo-noir Decision to Leave.
Next up is No Other Choice, a sprawling, pitch-black farce that starts out as a corporate satire and morphs into something so singular and distinct I’m not sure we really have a name for it.
It follows Yoo Man-soo, a manager at a Korean paper company that’s just been bought by an American conglomerate. We meet him and his family on a gorgeous afternoon as they’re barbecuing an eel – a symbol of virility – that his new overlords have sent him. “I’ve got it all,” he sighs, blissfully unaware the eel is essentially a severance present.
He soon realises the market for middle-aged middle managers isn’t exactly booming, with the same equally-qualified candidates applying for the same ever-diminishing pool of jobs. If only there were some way to eliminate the competition…
It’s hard not to draw parallels with Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Oscar winning Parasite, a pin-sharp satire of the Korean class system. But while there are similarities – both aesthetic and thematic – No Other Choice is less focused, more free-flowing, content to simply observe its characters once the dominoes have been set up and the first one tipped.
Like Parasite, it’s deliciously amoral, never flinching even as Yoo Man-soo’s actions become increasingly violent and demented. The camera watches with the same tongue-in-cheek voyeurism whether he’s twisting the branches of a bonsai tree or contorting a corpse so he can fit it into a shallow grave.
The film’s obsession with analogue media borders on fetishism: the men of the paper industry are utterly obsessed with the tactility of their product; characters listen to their music on vinyl; Yoo’s daughter is a cello protege. Technology, on the other hand, is to be mistrusted: the family casts off its Netflix subscription; a cache of stolen iPhones end up in the ground (“the tastiest things grow in shit!”); and the looming threat of AI is a malignant force on the horizon.
It’s an exquisite piece of filmmaking, every frame drenched in colour, every shot a visual feast (there’s a scene filmed beside the ocean, the frame bisected by jagged rocks, so utterly perfect you could hang it on your wall).
It’s also hilarious, a feat of physical comedy that extends throughout the whole cast. There are scenes that branch into outright slapstick, characters waddling their way through ineffectual chase scenes or botching executions because someone gave them a fright. Sometimes the punchline is as simple as someone farting.
In the Academy’s 98 years it has honoured exactly one foreign film with the Best Picture gong: Parasite. No Other Choice is in the running to double that.