There are any variety of films about individuals who attempt to reinvent themselves within the face of a disaster. There are lots of fewer films about individuals who violently refuse to even think about that concept — individuals who would slightly kill another person than develop into another person. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, sensible, and mordantly hilarious “No Different Selection” is the exception that proves the rule.
Plotted with ornate precision however unfolding with the panic of a determined man, this Vantablack comedy tells the story of a mustached paper manufacturing specialist (“Squid Recreation” villain Lee Byung-hun as Man-su) who achieves the suburban idyll simply in time to be let go from the corporate the place he’s labored for the final 25 years. Some American traders have purchased a chunk of the enterprise, and with it the correct to restructure issues as they see match.
The high-end eel meat that Man-su acquired within the mail ought to’ve been his first clue that he was on the chopping block. As a substitute, Man-su noticed it as proof that he’d lastly made it. “I’ve acquired all of it,” he sighs over the grill as he barbecues for his smiling spouse Miri (Son Yejin) and their two kids on the garden of the brutalist manse he purchased as a monument to his success.
But it surely’s already gone. “Off together with your head” is a standard chorus in Korea when somebody will get fired, and Man-su actually reacts to the lack of his job as if it have been an execution. He struggles to seek out one other gig within the quickly contracting paper business (and to wave away darkish ideas about his dutiful spouse fucking her tennis teacher), however there’s an excessive amount of competitors for the few spots that stay, and he refuses to think about one other profession path.
Man-su’s solely hope: A place on the ascendant Moon Paper, the place he’d work as a subordinate to one in every of his former underlings. The interview is a catastrophe, however simply as his previous firm had “no different selection” however to let him go, Man-su conspires to present the Moon Paper executives “no different selection” however to carry him aboard. The paper enterprise is a slightly specialised discipline, and Man-su causes that he would solely need to homicide a measly three individuals to develop into the one hirable candidate for the job. That doesn’t appear to be an unreasonable physique depend for somebody who’s about to default on his mortgage — somebody who’s already suffered the indignity of being pressured to cancel his household’s Netflix account. So Man-su publishes an advert for a faux new firm as bait for his competitors, and orchestrates a plan to kill his manner again to the highest.
Or to remain within the upper-middle, I ought to say. Among the many extra tragic ironies of “No Different Selection” is that Man-su goes to wild extremes simply to keep away from the horror of falling right into a barely decrease tax bracket. To his thoughts, the road between heaven and hell is as skinny because the glass partitions of the spectacular greenhouse the place Man-su tends to his bonsai timber at night time.
However Park’s movie — regardless of skewering capitalism with a lot of the identical wit, disappointment, and slapstick buffoonery that made Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” so resonant world wide — is pointedly not about poverty. Whereas Miri can not afford to place meat within the noodle soup she makes for dinner, her youngsters are by no means vulnerable to going hungry. It is a story about sustenance of a unique kind; it’s a “Looney Tunes”-like fable about how capitalism exerts itself by feeding our self-images because it fattens our wallets, and by conflating what we do with who we’re to the purpose that one turns into dependent upon the opposite.
That feeling infects society on virtually each stage. The film’s first life is a lot funnier when it occurs to different individuals snicker — a staple of Park’s darkly humane humorousness — comes from the sight of Man-su being stripped bare of a retailer uniform as he quits a retail job to be able to attend his Moon Paper interview. However in specializing in an upwardly cellular striver like Man-su, “No Different Selection” eschews each want and entitlement to be able to dramatize the extra broadly relatable dilemma of rooting your total identification in a system that may tear you out of the soil with no second thought.
Immaculately spacious for a narrative this unsubtle, Park’s movie toys with the concept that capitalism is an engine for ethical impunity — that it’s a universally accepted excuse for the form of inconsiderate cruelties that would appear past reproach in every other context. And though we perceive the final define of Man-su’s plan from the beginning, it’s so riveting to look at it play out (and go unsuitable) as a result of “No Different Selection” sees his homicide spree as a pure extension of capitalism, slightly than a weird aberration from it. Demented, sure. Insane, not a lot.
The result’s the uncommon movie that feels sympathetic towards its protagonist with out ever rooting for him, and Lee’s elastic efficiency as Man-su — clumsy, pathetic, cucked by osmosis, and nonetheless solely a hair worse than we’re — is vital to the balancing act of Park’s tragicomic tone. Straightforward to roll your eyes at from the opening scene and more and more pigheaded in all the ones that observe, Man-su begins off a great distance from likable and tumbles a lot decrease in our estimation from there. However the high-wire nature of the film’s plot requires us to understand the credibility of Man-su’s conviction with out essentially sharing it ourselves (there’s a terrific scene the place an oblivious Man-su lectures one of many males he needs to kill with all the similar perspective we’ve been screaming at him in our heads), and nobody on Earth can match Park’s signature capacity to make characters extra endearing as they stumble towards the void.
In a lot of the filmmaker’s earlier work, that capacity has been expressed with the sweep of a symphony and the precision of a Swiss watch, however nonetheless tempting it’s to bemoan the truth that Park’s work has been rising much less hyper-stylized since 2016’s “The Handmaiden” (the final word show of his Vivaldian genius), there’s a singular thrill in watching one of many world’s most fastidious administrators adapt a narrative (from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax”) a couple of half-witted moron whose first thought is to drop a flower pot on somebody’s head. Think about Wes Anderson collaborating with Joaquin Phoenix and also you’ll have a imprecise thought of the stress inherent to Park Chan-wook constructing a film round a man like Man-su, who plots just like the villain from “Oldboy” or the heroine of “Woman Vengeance” however executes with all of the grace of Wile E. Coyote. A bottomless wellspring of bodily comedy, Man-su is so dangerous at killing folks that it will definitely begins to look as if he could be the one one who doesn’t survive this film.
“No Different Selection” is unmistakably nonetheless a Park Chan-wook mission on its face (I misplaced depend of all of the diabolical match cuts, devious transitions, and delirious zooms that he units to a different string and harpsichord masterpiece from his long-time composer Cho Younger-wuk), but it surely’s meant to exist in a workaday register, and feels naturalistic even in comparison with the comparatively, and I stress comparatively, stripped down romanticism of “Choice to Depart.” Not solely does that rawer method supply a metatextual twist on the stress that’s pulling Man-su aside on the seams (that between resistance and reinvention), it additionally creates a extra quick stress of its personal: that between a gently organized film and a principal character so chaotic that you just virtually can’t think about him doing something proper. It permits “No Different Selection” to be each bigger than life and likewise just some missed paychecks away from a conceivable actuality.
However the Man-su we see on the finish of his rope isn’t the identical Man-su who received his business’s most coveted and meaningless award just some years prior. He’s higher in some methods and worse in a number of others. Extra importantly, he was extra sensible then. Having a gradual job can have that impact. Now it’s as much as his spouse Miri, one other of Park’s indelible feminine leads, to be the household’s final bastion of logic.
As Man-su’s arc begins to wilt towards the tip of the story, the crude violence of his plan regularly overgrown with gardening metaphors and magical pondering, Miri’s presence turns into stronger to stability issues out. Though “No Different Selection” lacks the emotional gutpunch of Park’s greatest movies (a lot as its devastatingly ironic remaining shot leaves a long-lasting bruise in its personal proper), Miri turns into a poignant vessel for all the film’s conflicted emotions about self-worth and survival. It’s Miri who’s pressured to account for what issues to their household, and for what they could be keen to dwell with or with out. It’s Miri who makes the toughest selections in a film the place everybody else refuses to simply accept that they’ve any selections to make in any respect.
Miri’s remaining resolution to [redacted] is as simple to rebuke as Man-su’s preliminary resolution to develop into a serial killer, however — to the immense credit score of a slaphappy film with a surprisingly highly effective sting — it’s additionally simply as troublesome to dismiss outright. She holds onto the one selection that each one of this insanity has left her with, and because the world round her surrenders its final measure of company to the calls for of an apathetically environment friendly future (shoutout to AI!), Miri’s refusal to desert what’s left of her personal virtually seems like its personal fucked up form of heroic act. Capitalism received’t ever care about you, however individuals will all the time be stuffed with surprises.
Grade: A-
“No Different Selection” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Competition. NEON will launch it in america.
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