No Other Choice

In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, NYFF60) crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. In a fine tightrope-walk of a performance, Lee Byung Hun brings humor and likability to the tricky role of Man-soo, a middle-aged husband and father who has been laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has devoted decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, Man-soo begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer, leading to wild—and ever more absurd—acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable and extravagant pitch-black comic style. Adapted from the Donald E. Westlake novel The Ax, updated for our precarious moment in time, Park’s No Other Choice is enthralling all the way to its brilliant bitter pill of an ending. A NEON release.