The film taking the concept of corporate cutthroat competition to the next level
A retrenched executive goes to extreme measures in Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new movie No Other Choice.
Korean director Park Chan-wook started thinking about adapting The Ax, an American horror-thriller about a sacked engineer who goes on a killing spree, almost 20 years ago.
Park is by no means a fluent English speaker, but he had already made Stoker – starring Nicole Kidman – in the US and he intended to make The Ax in Connecticut, where author Donald Westlake had set it. The Ax, published in 1997, was about workers – in this case, an engineer in the paper industry – losing their jobs to machines. It was very much of its time and place.
Director Park Chan-wook had spent years trying to make a version of The Ax. Now he has done it.Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
Years passed. Park couldn’t raise the finance to make his American film. Eventually, he was persuaded to move the story to Korea, where it fitted perfectly: Japan was a big importer of Korean paper, so the story rang true. The mechanisation of manual jobs, so feared in the 1990s, was small fry compared with the explosion in AI in the 2020s. The issues raised by The Ax, which Park turned into his smart, funny and ferocious film No Other Choice, turned out to be more urgent than ever.
Park, whose other films range from outrageously violent genre films (Old Boy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) to his recent drama Decision to Leave, has every reason to take aim at AI: the film industry is under threat as much as any other.
“It’s very near us and we can’t even predict how fast it is going to advance,” he says at the Venice Film Festival, where his film had its world premiere. “In the very near future, we will be able to write a prompt ‘give me a Hitchcock style film’ and it’s going to spit out quite a decent film. Regardless of how I feel about it, that development is not going to stop any time soon.”
Nor is capitalism, arguably the film’s bigger target.
When we first meet Man-su – played by Lee Byung-hun, familiar from Squid Game – he is wielding the barbecue tongs at his handsome rural villa. He has it all, he reflects: a vivacious wife (Son Ye-jin), an amiable stepson, a daughter who may be a cello prodigy, two endearing labradors and an executive job at the paper mill, recently taken over by a US company. They must like him. They gave him the parcel of gourmet eel he is now cooking.
