PARK CHAN-WOOK’S NO OTHER CHOICE SURFACES AMID THE JOB MARKET AND EMPLOYMENT RATES TAKING A MERCILESS BEATING, MAKING IT A PARTICULARLY RELEVANT WATCH.
After 25 years of loyal service at a company, you get unceremoniously laid off. What do you do? Yoo Man-soo’s solution: aim for the top job at another company and, one by one, kill off the candidates with superior qualifications threatening his chances.
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice surfaces amid the job market and employment rates taking a merciless beating across the U.S. and Canada, making it a particularly relevant watch. The high-quality production is spearheaded by a star-studded cast, including famous K-drama actors like Lee Byung-Hun (known for Squid Game and Mr. Sunshine), Son Ye-jin (Crash Landing on You and Something in the Rain), and Park Hee-soon (My Name and The Bequeathed).
The film unflinchingly dissects the darkest part of Yoo Man-soo’s imagination (Lee Byung-Hun), linked to his primal instinct to provide for his family. He asserts his dominance against his competitors for his wife’s affections (Son Ye-jin) and survival with the most grotesque display. He grits his teeth like it’s the only inevitable choice he has, wincing in pain from a rotten tooth, suggesting the natural evil festering deep inside him.
While the film holds up a mirror to the callous societal order we’ve come to accept as normal, tinged with our natural selfish inclination for self-preservation, it also forces the eye towards the grim reality of AI slowly gnawing away at human decency and capabilities.
The sickening spectacle tinged with dark humour is viewed through the lens of toxic masculinity, particularly in a South Korean context. The protagonist grapples with staying afloat in a suffering job market while maintaining appearances, a struggle viewers may be all too familiar with.
Proceed with caution, spoilers ahead.
Yoo seems to forge friendship or feel sympathy for the men he wants to kill, but surprisingly follows through with his extravagant and unnecessary solution for snagging the top job. His desire for material and financial gain trumps any pursuit of human connection or empathy.
The most cruel and unusual punishment is reserved for the man he envied the most (Park Hee-soon). He stuffs a crudely crumbled sausage and pours liquor through a funnel into the inebriated, barely conscious man’s throat. A vulgar comparison can be made between a sausage and a man’s genitals – in this case, he’s venting his frustration by forcing manhood processed by machines, washed down with alcohol, his weakness, into the throat of a man who seems to have it all. Indeed, Yoo’s job was taken over by a machine, and he used to be an alcoholic.
Yoo initially fights against the installation of machines to keep the jobs of men he’s been working with for over two decades. However, he casts his values aside when he finally gets the job he committed unspeakable crimes to obtain. We see the insidious takeover of AI as he walks alone through the paper factory at the end of the film, amidst robots and imposing machines, doing the same job he once did, but exponentially faster and with an infinitesimal margin of error.
As he strides past, the lights flicker off, plunging the machines back into darkness – they don’t need them to see. They are blind, solitary, and soulless, installing a new world order and ideal of efficiency and modernism to strive for – much like historical colonial forces.
Throughout the film, we’re also privy to his obsession with plants: he shapes them meticulously, to the point of excess as he accidentally snaps them. Let’s also mention his perverse bundling of a corpse like bonsai; he is fixated with putting something into a box and owning it, much like men have historically done through colonization. Another reference to colonialism is made during the costume party, with the Native Americans and John Smith costumes.
This recurring colonial symbolism could perhaps be linked to the emerging concept of AI colonialism. AI and robots are gradually alienating workers from their work, chiefly repetitive tasks, therefore displacing them and forcing them to re-orient their careers to survive. Especially in the Western world, artisanship and human creativity are now seen as a luxury, rather than the norm.
Though the film ends on an ominous note, there is a glimmer of hope, embodied by Yoo’s children. His cello prodigy daughter could represent that younger generations have solutions and potential we haven’t even begun to fathom. For instance, though she speaks only to echo her parents words, she quietly composes music through unusual patterns of coloured dots. Their purpose isn’t immediately clear to the audience, until she flips through the pages on a music stand as she plays complicated melodies alone in her room – it’s her own version of sheet music. The film seems to believe that young people are the answer for a return to humanity, perhaps through the purest art form society has collectively decided to condemn AI interference in: music.
Yoo’s son, on the other hand, could embody the clarity of mind and resourcefulness younger generations have that their parents don’t give them enough credit for. Despite his parents gaslighting him in a failed attempt to preserve his innocence, he knows he saw his father concealing a corpse, and not a pig, in his greenhouse.
He also takes initiative to try and ease his parents’ financial struggles by stealing cell phones to resell. These are quickly buried, reminiscent of landfills and tech waste. His parents insist that the “best things grow on filth”. This is perhaps also a reference to titansque industries growing thanks to unethical labor and inhumane working conditions.
South Korea’s chaebols, massive conglomerates credited with catapulting the formerly war-ravaged country onto the world stage, have faced accusations of labor rights abuse. However, these brands and many of their products are seen today as avant-garde, modern, and desirable: let’s mention Samsung, Hyundai, and LG.
Later in the film, Yoo seems to finally realize that his son is growing up – this is symbolized by him offering him a cigarette. However, this may also be a metaphor – in “passing the torch” to his son and acknowledging he is mature enough to deal with an adult reality, he is perhaps planting a seed of rot that will fester as he grows, maybe into a man as ruthlessly ambitious and greedy as his father; indeed, cigarettes are known to foster addiction and cause diseases. Perhaps this is even what caused Yoo’s rotten tooth that he suffers from throughout the film.
Cigarettes are also incredibly destructive to the environment he will have to live in long after his father is gone; indeed, according to the WHO, “every year, the tobacco industry costs the world more than 8 million human lives, 600 million trees, 200 000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water and 84 million tonnes of CO2.” It could be a nod to concern scientists have been ringing alarm bells about for decades: capitalism is destroying the planet.
Though nauseating to watch at times, the film has a powerful warning to send about toxic masculinity in the context of capitalism, and how it can fuel a vicious circle of prioritizing material gain over human connection in the pursuit of unrealistic ideals: Yoo having a perfect relationship with his wife, the biggest and most beautiful house, the top job, the highest income, and being perceived as a best and most successful family by all of society. In reality, these elements are almost always flawed in some way and compromises are unavoidable.
It also provides an extreme reflection on the trials and tribulations caused by the suffocating job market. The fact that Yoo’s overqualified competition didn’t have a job either speaks volumes about the dire state the employment landscape is in. By process of elimination, he made himself into the best candidate for the job, but at the cost of his own humanity.
Finally, the film sends a plea to stay alert – not necessarily for homicidal colleagues, but rather for the insidious implantation and dependence we are developing on AI. What boundaries are we willing to set for the AI that makes our lives easier, but that may ultimately end up living them for us?
Riveting and thought-provoking, No Other Choice is a fresh dark comedy thriller positively brimming with symbolism that will leave you pondering over the intentionally unanswered questions long after the credits roll.
