Filmgoing in Fenland II

My first film review of 2026, and devoted to an ambitious work by one of the most well-regarded international auteurs of the current moment. I saw this at the Cambridge Light Cinema.

No Other Choice - dir. Park Chan-Wook

I have not read Donald Westlake's 1997 novel, The Ax, widely acclaimed as it's prolific author's masterpiece, nor seen Costa-Gavras' 2005 film version, Le Couperet, which transposed the action to millennial France and (despite scant distribution in the UK) appears to be regarded as about the best thing in its veteran director's patchy later output. Nonetheless, I think it safe to say that Park Chan-Wook's No Other Choice looks pretty much set to supplant the latter - at least temporarily.

Evidently Costa-Gavras happily released the rights he retained to Westlake's book and publicly expressed support for an adaptation he must realistically have suspected would eclipse his own. Park has acknowledged this generosity in his film's dedication, but I think it demonstrates something significant about the current standing of Korean cinema in general and his own in particular. Since the western release of the outstanding revenge thrillers, Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), Park has enjoyed an enviable critical reputation that, surviving some eccentric choices, was consolidated with The Handmaiden (2016) - an unlikely but, as it turned out, masterly transposition of Sarah Waters' Sapphic Victorian melodrama, Fingersmith, to the Japanese-occupied Korea of the 1930s. Together with Bong Joon Ho, he most visibly represents the international face of his nation's varied, vigorous and highly professionalised film industry and if, unlike Bong, he doesn't have a Best Picture Oscar on his mantle-piece, his estimation amongst cineasts is arguably higher.

Only his second film in the decade since The Handmaiden, No Other Choice evidently went through several stages of development and was interrupted by other ventures, including Park's uneasy Hollywood debut, Stoker (2013). Park has spoken of it as a "lifetime project" that he hopes will come to be seen as his own masterpiece. Intricately constructed, painstakingly detailed in production, exuberantly acted by a large cast, and realised through often dazzling technique, it is certainly a masterwork. However, like Park's previous movie, Decision to Leave (2022), it left me both mildly baffled and somewhat concerned at the self-conscious grandiosity that seems gradually to be overtaking his film-making.

Filtering their essential nastiness through cleverly oblique narrative and visuals of mesmerising elegance, Park's early revenge thrillers unsurprisingly invited comparisons with Hitchcock. Looking back over his output to date, I would suggest a closer match would be with Brian de Palma. I don't mean by this so much to imply that Park and de Palma are simply flagrant Hitchcock imitators, nor that they are strictly comparable to each other in achievement, more that the "Hitchcocktails" both like serving up are rooted in a rather similar brand of showmanship, foregrounding a combination of sensationalism, knowing heartlessness and formidable technique to sometimes dizzying but often muddled effect. Although the pyrotechnics of his early films are wickedly diverting, de Palma's occasional attempts at relative seriousness - Obsession, Blow Out, Casualties of War, The Black Dahlia - tend to ring hollow. Whereas Park's output shows a density of dramatic content and seriousness of social observation quite absent from the American director's work, I am by no means sure that the same could not be said of his own recent efforts.

A stately homage to/meditation on Hitchcock's Vertigo, Decision to Leave saw an intriguing mystery plot with complex patterns of imagery and a teasing (if, for non-Korean speakers, fairly opaque) linguistic dimension distressingly (or, for some viewers, depressingly) swallowed up by an intractable melancholy. Starting out as a black comedy with satirical spikes, the new film at least promises a more generically digestible experience but rapidly accrues strange coruscations of narrative and symbol that demand considerable patience and attention from the viewer. In both cases, the bravura of Park's presentation is indisputable but the solidity of whatever lies beneath invites questions.

The central character of No Other Choice, Man-Su, is a dedicated, reasonably prosperous, respectably married middle class employee of a paper-manufacturing company, who descends into a desperate life of serial murder following his unexpected redundancy. Originally it seems, Park intended to preserve The Ax's American setting, but his decision (perhaps following his less than ideal experience with Stoker) to transfer the action to Korea was obviously a wise one. There is a convincing density of social "groundedness" about the film's exposition that masks the sluggishness with which the mayhem is set in motion. Man-Su and his beautiful, intelligent wife Mi-Ri lead a seemingly contented existence of self-contained bourgeois conformity in a desirable chalet-style suburban house - as it turns out, the one he grew up in - with two young children, ample barbecue equipment and a pair of cute dogs. From the start, however, it is apparent that the Mozart slow movement which serves as their favoured home muzak is a misleadingly pellucid symbol of their domestic bliss. The seeds of marital distrust are already well sown. Although their children are matchingly named - Si-one and Ri-one - they are only half-siblings. The teenage Si-one is Mi-Ri's son by a previous marriage, and the jealousy resulting from an uncomfortable awareness of her past, together with an unspoken acknowledgement of her superior poise and sophistication, will manifest physically in Man-Su (whom we eventually discover has a youthful history of disruptive alcoholism) as severe toothache after the couple's depleted circumstances lead her to take a job as assistant to a suave dentist. Si-one is going through a teenage tearaway phase under the influence of a friend whose vulgar upwardly mobile parents his father despises. Mi-Ri, whom the film never full shows, is an autistic 'cello prodigy, inhabiting a delicately (and expensively) maintained environment of her own.

Some might think all of this quite enough to be getting on with without embroiling it in the protocols of genre. But, a genre exercise this is - or unhurriedly becomes - as Man-su, frustrated in his expectation of legitimate re-employment within the paper industry, devises a cumbersomely ingenious scheme to murder himself back into it. This involves taking out a fake advert to identify his likely rivals and the excavation of his father's Vietnam War-era gun. As you might be starting to gather, nothing in this film happens simply. The same could probably be said of Park's two previous films, but where the slow build-up of The Handmaiden, especially, paid of handsomely in mystery, suspense and romantic release, here the relentless accumulation of detail, symbol, and sub-plot, not only slows the exposition to a crawl, but dangerously overloads it.

Now, it must be admitted that Park's virtuosity is thoroughly intoxicating. There are shots through skylights and through the bottom of raised glasses, elegant pans and disorienting jump cuts, mixed in with stately, long-held compositions. In one of these last, the wide-screen is jaggedly bisected by a rocky outcrop overlooking the isolated stretch of nocturnal coast road on which Man-su's most pathetic victim is dispatched. It might almost be seen as emblematic of a film whose stylistic surface and dramatic substance often feel as though they are running in oddly uncoordinated parallel.

In construction, the film comes across as though consciously divided into chunks or, if one prefers, "chapters". The chapter concerning the first murder culminates in an interminable writhing melee, involving Man-su, the victim and the latter's frantic, unfaithful wife. Presumably it is meant to be funny and the marital crisis Man-su has unwittingly blundered in on is possibly intended as a distorted mirror of his own. It's all very well staged and acted with conviction but - for me at least - weirdly un-exciting. The tortuous build-up, however, set in a wild wooded landscape of twisting grey trunks and vibrant autumnal colours, has its own fascination. In at least one long-held shot, one has to concentrate hard before making the crouching Man-su out amongst the riotous vegetation by which he is surrounded.

This is one of several moments where Park appears to be articulating a faintly disturbing vision of a world in which Man (man?) and nature are in quiet internecine conflict. His protagonist is tied, after all, to an industry (paper) that faces more than its share of environmental questions. As someone who has lived most of his life reading books or selling them, these certainly give me pause. Film-making itself is - or certainly can be - a wasteful and ecologically damaging enterprise and the witty final credits of No Other Choice are a pointed reminder that much human artistic endeavour depends upon the destruction of trees. In unconscious acknowledgement of this, Man-su marks the site of a corpse disposal with a freshly planted sapling. The body in question has been trussed up in the manner of a slaughtered pig and he will go on to disguise his final victim - a coarse vulgarian who bombs around drunk in a vast gas-guzzling car - as the having succumbed to fatal gluttony by shovelling minced pork into his mouth.

Though by this stage, Man-su is helping two lugubrious detectives with their dimwitted enquiries and his wife and son are developing suspicions, what little sense of cumulative suspense there is gets drowned out by a protracted untangling of the knots the movie has tied itself in. Ultimately, I am not entirely sure of the extent to which Park is consciously confounding genre expectations (in the manner, perhaps, of Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955) with which it shares a few odd similarities of look and tone) or is simply mis-calculating. Overall, however, I am just inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. A question his new film never convincingly answers is why Man-su should be so fixated on regaining the specific employment he has been fired from as not to consider other possibilities before resorting to murder. When asked this himself directly, he replies confusedly with the movie's title. Sybolically, he is as trussed as the man buried in his garden and, for all his obvious confidence, Park himself may be similarly bound, the exalted position he has deservedly achieved and the weight of expectation attending each new release, actually restricting his creative options or, at least, pressurising him into overblown excess. This superbly crafted but exasperating film could be seen as knowingly dramatising that predicament. There can be no denying it's creator's talent, so perhaps he can escape from the portentous paths he is losing himself in. Let us hope so, and that he doesn't feel he has "no other choice" than to pursue them.