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.
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.
The eel, however, is a parting gift. The new bosses, claiming they have “no other choice” include Man-su in a raft of retrenchments. He is convinced he will soon get another job, but retrenchments are happening everywhere. So he comes up with a crazy plan. If he kills his competitors, he thinks, he will be the only candidate left standing.
“The way that he kills these best candidates is very similar to how a company would fire their employees,” Park says. But what can he do? The paper industry is all he knows. He has a family to protect. In his mind, he has no other choice.
The film jumps from melodrama to farce and back; we catch ourselves rooting for Lee Byung-hun, always a sympathetic actor, only to be appalled when he does something dreadful.
“I wanted to make a film that would encourage viewers to ask questions,” Park says. “What is considered the lowest level of life for Korea’s contemporary middle class? What standard of living must you maintain to consider your life decent? So – what, exactly, does this man desire to protect?”
To a great extent, he is protecting his status. Initially, this seems contemptible, but many of us can relate to the way his identity is wound up with his work. “Paper is his life. Similarly, I can’t explain my life without using movies,” Park told Indiewire in an interview about No Other Choice.
“I think my life would almost have nothing if I didn’t have movies in it. Of course, I do have family, but I spent so much of the time I should have spent on my family on movies as well. And I wouldn’t know how to do anything else in life.”
Over the years he was developing the film, producers and financiers would joke that he could set it in the movie business, but he kept coming back to paper-making.
“I think it’s because paper is something we’re all so familiar with,” Park says. “It’s always with us. You can physically touch it but, at the same time, you don’t think about who makes it. You just crumple it up and throw it out without a second thought. And I also like the fact it comes from trees. The more I thought about those processes, the closer it seemed to life itself. ”
The final shot of the film shows a forest being razed to stumps – by robots, of course. Most of the time, however, Park Chan-wook avoids thinking about the algorithms vying for his own job. “For me, it’s always the task at hand,” he says. “What am I doing next? What am I shooting tomorrow, what am I cutting today? That’s really all you can concentrate on.”
No Other Choice is in cinemas from Thursday
Stephanie Bunbury is a film and culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
