Paperman

NO OTHER CHOICE

2025

Directed by Park Chan-wook

Written by Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Lee Ja-hye, and Park Chan-wook (based on The Ax by Donald Westlake)

Spoilers: moderate

As enthusiastically as I approached No Other Choice ("actually showing up on opening day" would obviously have more significance with a domestic blockbuster release, but certainly must have some significance), I would have no business being disappointed by Park Chan-wook, whose movies have more often than not bounced off me a little, even if the source of my enthusiasm, 2022's extraordinary romantic noir Decision To Leave, had felt like me turning a page with Park and finding what I'd been missing in the filmmaker.  So if I am disappointed in No Other Choice, it's because it wasn't bouncing off me—it has passages where I felt certain it was at the work of being the salvation of a whole underwhelming cinematic year—but at the end of the day it's only a good movie rather than an extraordinary one, peaking so early in its 139 minutes that it ought it be a crime, and using that 139 minutes in such a way that I think I might have to throw up my hands in bafflement, because it's not even slow, let alone boring, but given the lack of detailed treatment in pretty much everything in its back half, that almost feels like an impatience with the repetition inherent to its avowedly vignettish structure—I mean, it's basically a slasher film, even if I doubt most people would call it that and it would be overpromising anyway—there's obviously no way it's simply being efficient, either, and to some degree I genuinely don't know where that runtime actually went.

Based on an American novel (Donald Westlake's The Ax) from all the way back in 1997, and reportedly long-nurtured as a potential project by Park, the production history of No Other Choice pretty much actively refutes it, but I think you could be forgiven for looking at it and wondering if the more proximate trigger was his countryman Bong Joon-ho briefly taking over the whole damned world with his anti-capitalist movie, Parasite, a few years ago.  They're violent thrillers, at any rate, playing with something like the same basic ideas about class in South Korea (with a more universal applicability, obviously enough, considering the source material isn't Korean*), especially the ideas about identifying with the system so strongly that the only class struggle you can conceptualize is one against your own, made a little more rigid by way of a title that reflects the attitudes of basically every character in the film, from the upper echelons on down, regarding a capitalism that seemingly reduces the available choices of all its participants to, well, none, except outcome-maximizing sociopathy, though I do suspect you'll be apt to question if that's actually true in regards to the choices that are made here.  And while it may not be immediately clear from the identical score I'm going to give No Other Choice, I do think it does "story about class" better than Parasite, at least in terms of "being a story in the first place," for it's rather less schematic, and more interestingly fucked up in ways where you don't more-or-less "get it" instantaneously (twist or no twist).  On the other hand, it's also coming at it from the opposite angle, and hence is more likely to complicate your appraisal of it, since it's at least a bit like if the stupid rich family from Parasite were slightly less stupid**, rather more affirmatively evil, and the protagonists.

So in South Korea lives Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), and if he says he is a paper man, you will agree, and he is currently celebrating—with his wife Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), his stepson (though the stepson doesn't know this) Si-one (Woo Seung Kim), and their biological daughter Ri-one (So Yul Choi)—a recent gift from his employer, Solar Paper, that undoubtedly seems more lavish and generous to them because they're sufficiently slow on the uptake not to realize that, in a context that already includes the firm's merger with an American paper company and the cutting of dozens of jobs, this is only the preface to manager Man-su's own lay-off.  (When confronted, Man-su's superiors shall inform him they had—get this—"no other choice.")  Man-su goes into a depressive tailspin while he fails to find a similarly-situated position—thirteen months later, he's working a retail gig that he has to abscond from in order to make a last-minute interview with a Japanese paper company, which would be humiliating enough, because the process there means surrendering his store-owned uniform and leaving half-naked, even if he  had gotten the new job, which he did not.  His wife has returned to work and he's half-sure her dentist boss is fucking her; they're caught flatfooted when their autistic daughter, whose prodigy as a cellist they worry may be the only means by which she might live independently, exceeds her cello tutor's ability to teach her and who therefore recommends they graduate her to an inordinately expensive, serious cello tutor instead; and, having lost much of their quality of life already, they're on their way to losing their beautiful house, too, the house Man-su was born in, albeit considerably fixed-up (it even has a greenhouse to support Man-su's botany hobby) thanks to the salary he used to have, even if it appears that he did not apply as much of that salary towards the note the bank still holds on it as he probably ought to have done.  (Quietly but not, I believe, accidentally, we're invited to wonder how thoughtlessly and automatically the Yoos allowed their expenses to rise to meet their income, so that despite previously being objectively rich they remained, effectively, poor.)

On another interview (or "interview," as it's more like he's barged in to beg a man going to the bathroom for a job), Man-su debases himself enough to be thrown out and humiliated by a person he attaches a specific vengeful feeling to (Park Hee-soon), and when, later, happenstance offers him the prospect of impulsively satisfying this vengeance by killing him Looney Tunes-style by dropping a flower pot on his head, he realizes he could, and hatches another idea instead: if his problem is that there are too many laid-off paper factory overseers all looking for work like him, his problem would be ameliorated if only there were fewer, so Man-su anonymously takes out a phony job ad in Paper Monthly (that might not be the real name of the magazine) and begins luring his unwitting rivals into submitting their resumes, in preparation for "interviews" with him.  Those he can beat, on the square, are safe.  Those he thinks he can't (besides Park H. previously mentioned, the other two are played by Lee Sung-min and Cha Seung-won) have sealed their fates with their response, as Man-su prepares himself to kill the three men who would take his job.

So the satire here is pretty obvious in its most important aspects, which I don't mean as a negative: it's vigorous and caustic and completely over-the-top, but only as a logical extension of the capitalist worldview that pits worker against worker, and even if all Man-su did was to simply beat them on the level, and get the position they're all in contention for, from what we see of these four men who are quickly heading there without their socioeconomic status, he'd be more-or-less consigning them to death anyhow, so why not just get it over with violently, but quickly—even comparatively mercifully?  (It'd be more satisfying if Man-su were angrier at evil CEOs, but not, you know, as funny, and probably not as true.)  There's also a whole lot of straight-faced comedy developed out of just how ridiculously attached they are to their professions, as if paper is the fucking life and the way and without it they can only be cast into darkness, which dovetails into the more troubling implications, that this is all fundamentally reactionary, since it's kind of hard to imagine how, if Man-su really could improve his chances of getting this one job by killing as few as three people, he couldn't find something at least roughly equivalent to being Boss Paper in a field not altogether far removed if he were willing to even slightly change his aims.  (Maybe I overestimate it, but, like, one word, man, plastics.)  There's certainly also something to the very idea of these men being this into paper, specifically, all the way out here in the mid-2020s—the paper trade magazine is a pretty hilarious touch—so while you could make a little too much of this, as paper continues to get used for a lot besides communications media, it's still a withering field if not a dying one, but one that Man-su and his fellows have nevertheless clung onto with grim, deadly determination.

But what matters, of course, because it's what always matters, is how Park is going after it, and this is both where the movie achieves greatness pretty quickly, and then goes on to squander some of that greatness anyway.  Park's said one of his goals was to ground the story a bit more firmly in its hero's (or antihero's) domesticity, and it achieves this fairly well with some caveats, the big one being a late-coming revelation that somewhat reorients our understanding of Man-su, an almost-but-not-quite-overbearingly loving family man, and which I don't think the film benefits from just tossing it off (turns out he used to be a bit abusive towards his stepson), but since I don't think it benefits from having it at all (as much as I appreciate that this isn't a one-dimensional anti-capitalist screed and manages to spare significant contempt for its protagonist, it just doesn't square properly with the satire), I guess I can't complain too much.  This is distinct from his fears about his wife's fidelity, which probably get tied off too early, whereas I appreciate what Son is given to do here and even in the exact way she gets to do it**—Park's most salient addition to the novel, as I understand it***, is the expanded spousal role—as she eventually begins to notice her husband is probably not going to job interviews and might, in fact, be murdering people for their common weal.  But the kids may be a little bit of a timesink, not too keenly-felt, as Ri-one at least adds some unique texture (not necessarily very sensitive texture, I shall stand agnostic on that), though when we wander off with Si-one for a reel, for all it sets up a terrific gag, it's maybe not one that needed that whole reel's commitment for a set-up.

Mostly the dog's-eared storytelling is a good thing, though, as it does embed Man-su in recognizable humanity, and even get us to understand his quandary and align us with him on his awful mission, which is morally corrosive to good narrative ends; but then, what probably manages that even more is the rubber-to-the-road proceduralism that feels like it's going to be the movie's main operating mode, and certainly the driver of its most forceful black comedy, leaning on the immense practical difficulty inherent to killing anybody in a way that you might have a modest hope of getting away with it, especially when you don't actually want to, and especially-especially when you have literally no experience with stalking, fighting, shooting, or anything related to murder, so that Man-su is an amazing fuck-up at it.  This is mostly only "initially" though, and his first victim is by far the hardest, with Man-su's tactical surveillance shading into actual dithering, for long enough that a surprisingly complete picture of the man and even his wife (Yeom Hye-ran) comes into focus, almost like a whole secondary set of protagonists for as long as they're going concerns; and when the climax of this drawn-out series of sequences does finally come, it is an absolute comedy of errors shitshow, easily the best thing in the movie and the greatest beneficiary of the disorientingly-aggressive sound design that Park's decided on (just some outrageous mixing choices on ambient sounds throughout, but with a much more concrete rationale for the overwhelming noise, mostly music, here), essentially an action-thriller setpiece but with three stupid people who, for the topper, are slipperier in their allegiances than you'd guess, so that sometimes it's the two against Man-su but not entirely, affording it an explosive volatility that is incredibly thrilling at the same time it's very funny.

And throughout it is a tremendously well-made movie, which is sort-of like being a great one: this sequence, which spends the most time outdoors in a semi-natural setting, arguably gets the most out of Kim Woo-hyung's cinematography or at least the most out of his frequently-saturated colors (though it can kind of feel like the movie's main phase extends over months, it also feels like the entire thing takes place amidst an autumn that's gorgeous even as it foretells death), but the whole enterprise is akin to it, with a lot of directorial filigree, much of it also at the business of getting you into Man-su's headspace (one of my very favorite things in the movie is the sheer unpleasantness of his interview at the Japanese paper company, where a blinding reflection off a neighboring skyscraper, sometimes-but-not-always occluded by one of his interviewers' silhouettes, keeps blasting itself right into Man-su's face).  Now, there is nothing here, I think, that will blow your mind if you've seen Decision To Leave, and it does not have the immense underlying soulfulness that made this filigree so meaningful for Decision To Leave; but "not as beautiful a union of aesthetics and narrative as an out-and-out masterpiece" obviously leaves a lot of room to remain successful as a motion picture, and No Other Choice is very successful within the same general style of space-collapsing gestures and intentional, high-impact editing choices.

It just kind of peters out, is all, or at least—I do think that that's much too damning—it deescalates without realizing it.  That first victim, and his entire sequence, is tremendous stuff, and maybe a little bad to have started the main phase off with (I keep using the term "main phase" because the movie can't have "acts," as such—if it does, it has maybe five—but is also commendably patient about laying the emotional and logistical groundwork for the thriller we came to see); it is, anyway, the most mechanically and emotionally complex of the murder sequences and it's the most by a country fucking mile.  None of the subsequent sequences have anything like the same number of moving parts (hell, I didn't even mention the wife's young lover); none of the subsequent sequences are as interested in the person Man-su has targeted (the first victim is lovingly afforded substantial flashbacks to his and his wife's youthful vigor, and the proverbial dream of a life that didn't come true, and that's if I'm not misremembering some of them and they were his wife's flashbacks); and none of the subsequent sequences even provide much in the way of thrillmaking obstacles to their completion.  There's something to be said about the varied tones—the second one is more about bodily disposal and hence more an exploration of the macabre than thrills-as-such; the third one is a very ugly murder effected more through subterfuge than violence, that's somewhat-anesthetized but not by any means "quick"—but they don't pop as much, and it just feels very backwards that the thriller pops like mad in its first hour, and relaxes into a more staid state afterwards, while also backtracking on how much agency and humanity it'd like to give Man-su's unwitting adversaries.

On the other hand, there's an arc of sorts to that and Lee is pretty fantastic at charting Man-su's moral disintegration; and it segues into a kind of an all-timer ending, a stomach-churning denouement that is objectively a "triumph," inside an empty, dark AI-run Player Piano factory that Man-su works in all alone but, to all appearances, "happy" with his victory.  So it sends you out on an awfully high (that is, apocalyptic) note, even if there is sort of a sensation of incompleteness to it all.

Score: 7/10 (a very hard 7/10, though, and I might be underrating it) oh, let's call it a light 8/10, I'm pretty sure it's going to stick with me at least that much

*And already adapted out of its original context once before, as The Axe (with an "e") in France by Costas-Gravas.

**When Mi-ri attends a ballroom dancing class dance party dressed like "Pocahontas," I half-wonder if they're making fun of the "Indian" garb the kid's wearing in Parasite, especially since this is what Man-su thinks John Smith wore:

**It is, after all, already paper in the novel.