"In a turn of events that seems, on the face of it, to promise a return to the ultraviolent stylings of Park's Vengeance trilogy, he hatches a plan to bump off rival candidates in order to put his career back on track - but nothing goes quite according to plan in this wicked black comedy, which is more in the Hitchcockian mould of The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave than his earlier, bloodier work."
"Lee excels as a man still getting the hang of murder, and Son Ye-jin is terrific as his wife, Lee Mi-ri, whose discovery of Man-su's secret prompts some unexpected soul searching of her own. But the main draw here is Park, who continues to cook up ever-more elegant and visually stunning riffs on his signature themes - there's a jaw dropping moment where Man-su gets drawn into an awkward dance with a factory robot - without losing the subversive lens that makes him such a treasure."
Park Chan-wook's film No Other Choice presents a darkly comic satire of late-capitalist workplace anxiety. Man-su, a family man and middle manager, loses his cushy job during company restructuring and begins plotting to eliminate rival candidates to restore his career, with bungled attempts and unintended consequences. Lee Byung-hun portrays a man awkwardly learning murder, while Son Ye-jin plays his wife, whose discovery of the secret prompts soul-searching. The film blends elegant visual flourishes and Hitchcockian pacing, mixing campy premise with a chilling question about the moral and personal costs of succeeding in today's workplace. A separate project reconstructs a 1974 experiment in recorded daily conversations based on a discovered transcript of photographer Peter Hujar, presented with artistic liberties in a low-stakes, mesmerising form.
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