Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice may at times be an outrageously absurdist showcase of a very “if he wanted to, he would” predicament. But this is a movie that has a way of making you root for a serial killer when you thought you wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. So I guess it suffices to say that, while Man-su’s arc takes some ridiculously dark turns as his career slips through his fingers, his acute desperation to hold on to the role he’s taken on as the provider and protector of his family is a frighteningly relatable phenomenon for the middle class battling late-capitalism. But that’s merely the thematic surface of a film that takes on a very personal, utterly crazy story of a family’s survival in the face of the main breadwinner’s unemployment, that too against the backdrop of the decline of the Korean paper industry. So you’re not just looking at a whole bunch of intense moral dilemmas down the line, but an overwhelming supply of exploratory questions that have just as much to do with your world as it does Man-su’s.
Spoiler Alert
Why Does Man-Su Become A Killer?
That eel Man-su roasted on one of the best days he’d ever spent with his family might as well have been a snake like his son Si-one thought. The eel came with a severance package that Man-su’d mistakenly thought was a token of appreciation from his company, Solar Paper, for decades of loyalty and back breaking work. Because Man-su really cares about his coworkers, his job, and the business itself, he’s probably been too distracted by the ax looming over his friends at work. Ever since the American acquisition, Solar Paper has decided to let go of a big chunk of their blue-collar workers. Man-su’s been so busy in his sincere and impassioned attempts to unionize his coworkers that he completely overlooked the fact that he’s getting axed as well. But as someone who’s loved his job and given his best to it for every single day he’s worked at Solar Paper, Man-su probably never expected such an unappreciative move by the company. That’s what happens when employees forget that, when push comes to shove, and especially if there’s a big shift in management, a company will always put money before history. They’ll say that they had no other choice. But if they can choose to spend money on something as wildly patronizing as arranging the most insincere support seminar for the people who’ve just lost their jobs, you know that they know what they’re doing. How’s tapping all over their faces while chanting the most frustratingly toxic-positive motivational slop going to help these people feed the mouths that depend on their employment status? But in Man-su’s case, the seminar was right about his family being supportive. Miri was the most excited to finally get to splurge on things that she and Man-su had only ever dreamed about. Falling from that great height–straight to the cold ground of a serious financial crisis–Miri is surprisingly steady, much more so than Man-su. It comes easier to her to break bad news to the kids, because she’s much more in control of her emotions than Man-su is. But it isn’t just that Man-su feels like he’s failing in his traditional role as the man of the house when his wife has to go out and get a part time job. Because he wants nothing more than to make his family happy, it breaks his heart to feel like he’s responsible for their current misery. And it’s miserable, alright. They’re too broke to feed themselves, let alone their two dogs. I think the moment everything changes for Man-su is when he watches the spark go out of Ri-one’s eyes as the dogs leave to stay with Miri’s parents. To be unable to stop that big a blow to his little daughter’s heart is something he can never be okay with. But it isn’t all about that for Man-su now, is it? His minimum wage part-time gigs are nowhere close to what they need to get by. It’s certainly not enough to keep them from losing their house. That’s a sacrifice that the rest of his family would’ve been relatively okay with making. But that’s the big no-no for Man-su. This house is everything to Man-su, not because he’s made it beautiful with his own two hands, but because it stands as a symbol of success and perseverance to him. He keeps his father’s gun in the display case as a token of his respect for his service in Vietnam. But he’s also completely aware of the aspects of life where his father failed. Like many of his peers, Man-su’s father was left wounded by the war he’d supposedly survived. After that, bad luck struck him down when all the pigs in his farm caught a terrible disease. The fact that Man-su’s dad killed himself right after going through something as gut-wrenching as having to bury all his pigs alive isn’t simple either. It was not only the end of his livelihood, but it might’ve also been a reminder of all the death back in his days of service. Failure took Man-su’s dad, and then the farm was bought by Wonno. Buying this house back, building it into the gorgeous place it is today, and even finding a corner for the greenhouse he’s always wanted have been Man-su’s win over the sad legacy of his father. To watch it all slip through his fingers as Wonno looks around the place with the realtor like he owns the place already, it’s got to be insanely frustrating for Man-su. He’ll probably never forget that sharp look of contempt from his mother-in-law. He’s fallen as a husband, a father, a plant and dog parent, and as the only man he’s ever wanted to be–a manager at a paper mill. Awfully Dwight of him. The last thing Man-su thought he’d do would be to get down on his knees for a job, that too at a restroom at Moon Paper. It’s not that Man-su doesn’t want to accept that most paper companies are cutting costs. He’s taken a stroll of the job market, and after an especially bad interview, he’s seen that the company he wanted to join is on a firing spree as well. Standing in stark contrast to Man-su is the manager at Moon Paper, Choi Sun-chul. The last thing that Man-su should be doing is scroll through Choi Sun-chul’s instagram, watching another man discover the joys of life while he’s losing everything. The only thing that Man-su’s family expected to be able to keep paying for was Ri-one’s cello lessons. But even that proves a daunting task now that the daughter who’s never played a note for them turns out to be a cello genius who needs much more advanced lessons. Who knows? Maybe it’s Miri’s casual remark about the wonderful possibility of a pointy umbrella hitting Choi Sun-chul on a stormy night that inspires a dark thought in Man-su. What if he could actually arrange such a freak “accident” to take out Choi Sun-chul? But the thing is, Man-su isn’t like this at all. I doubt that he’s spent a single day of his life plotting someone’s demise. And I really doubt that he’d ever want to unless his back was to the wall. Since there really is no way for Man-su to get a job at a paper company anytime soon, he’s forced to think out of the box for this one. He’s faced with the loss of everything that makes him feel like a man and not a “loser” unless he does something extreme. But when he’s standing on a stranger’s roof, about to drop a pepper plant on the head of an unsuspecting Choi Sun-chul down on the pavement, it dawns on Man-su that taking out the manager at Moon Paper doesn’t guarantee that he’ll get the job. So he’s got to think even bigger. And it seems like Man-su takes all his fixations seriously enough to immerse himself into them completely. It might have been paper, plants, and creating things with his hands before. But now, Man-su’s going for a little alternative break between jobs to take care of his competitions. As a former “Pulp Man of the Year,” Man-su knows that the Pulp Magazine must be a staple at the households of all the unemployed A-listers looking for the same job that he is. So by creating a fake company and taking out an ad in the magazine to scope out the competition, Man-su gets to narrow his focus on the two people who’d deserve the job more than him once he kills the current manager at Moon Paper. You see, Man-su probably would’ve never done anything like this if he thought that his family could survive a major lifestyle downsizing. He’s never completely felt secure with a wife he knows is way out of his league, no matter how loving, reassuring, and understanding Miri is to him. And with a daughter who only speaks to parrot things said by other people, he feels like a failure as a dad already. And then there’s his complicated relationship with Si-one, Miri’s son from a previous marriage. There’s this sense that, despite wanting nothing more than to be a father to Si-one, Man-su has never really connected with him. So you can imagine how Man-su’s paranoia about losing everything he cares about will only be aggravated by the imminent loss of his home unless he goes to extreme lengths. They do say that anybody can be a murderer if the circumstances are dire enough.
Pulp Killer of the Year
There can’t be any debate over the fact that murder should be the last thing on Man-su’s mind. You could even argue that Man-su should’ve sooner picked any other path than the one that makes him feel like he’s compelled to kill Gu Bum-mo, Go Si-jo, and Choi Sun-chul. But at the same time, the last thing that can be invalidated is the middle class’ PTSD when the old scarcities and deprivations threaten to become the norm again. Why is it much more acceptable for people to lose their minds over losses that are less material? That’s because we’ve been tricked into believing that being attached to material dreams is somehow negative. You know how the rich try to school the middle class on how not to “splurge” on things that make them happy. The world’s been manipulated into dismissing the very real, very personal meaning a little bit of “luxury” can have to someone who’s always only had very humble goals. So try as you might to convince yourself that you’re not on Man-su’s side a little bit as he goes on his freaky adventures to kill, your conscience is trapped between a rock and a hard place. Gum-mo, a sternly analog man who only listens to vinyl and writes letters on paper, has been a depressed layabout ever since he got fired from the company that happily let him spend his life building it up before tossing him out. Sounds a lot like our anti-hero, doesn’t he? That’s hardly the complete extent of how devastatingly similar Gum-mo and Man-su are. The longer Man-su stakes out Gum-mo and observes his odd relationship with his wife, Ara, the more he realizes that Gum-mo might be what he could turn out to be in the near future if he doesn’t get his life in order. But because Man-su is far from right in his head, especially given the current state of his life, when he finds Gum-mo and Ara’s issues relatable, he completely internalizes them like his own. That’s why he goes back home and repeats what Ara and Gum-mo said to each other word-to-word to a puzzled Miri. Man-su isn’t wrong in thinking that he’s fighting the same demons as Gum-mo. They’re both so acutely in love with the art of paper that they can’t imagine themselves in any other line of work. They’ve both been neglecting themselves and their wives. But unlike Ara, Miri isn’t cheating on her husband. Ara can hardly be blamed for straying from a marriage with a man who doesn’t make the tiniest bit of effort to make life a little bit bright for her. It only convinces Man-su more of the similarity between these two marriages when, like Ara, Miri also reminisces the old days with just a touch of some kind of regret in her voice. What Man-su doesn’t get is that Ara and Miri’s regrets are different. Ara regrets letting a young, charming Gum-mo sweep her off her feet and proceed to ruin her life. What Miri regrets is having been married before Man-su. The fact that Miri feels less worthy as a wife for being a divorcee is glaring every time she brings it up. But since thoughts are a jumble in Man-su’s mind, seeing Ara cheat on her no-good husband with a young stud only convinces him that Miri will do just the same. The entire insane sequence where Man-su goes through with the plan and shows up at Gum-mo’s place with his father’s gun is revealing in ways that you’d only fully absorb after like 5-6 runs of the whole bit. So I’m just gonna go ahead and jot down every single peculiar between-the-lines action and reaction and tell you what I think about them. I really think that Man-su only covered up his gun-wielding hand with layers of plastic-wrap and mittens because this is his first kill. He wanted to make sure that he had enough conviction in the kill to take off all these layers and still shoot the man. Man-su has completely forgotten the difference between him and Gum-mo, and that’s why his frustrated words of advice to Gum-mo don’t at all fit his circumstances. In yelling at Gum-mo, Man-su is trying to rattle himself awake before he loses everything. Ara would’ve struck his head with her husband’s Pulp Man of the Year award had Gum-mo not spoken just the wrong thing. When Man-su found out about Ara’s infidelity, he tried to keep Gum-mo from finding out about it, because in saving their marriage, he was trying to save his. But Gum-mo did learn about Ara’s affair and had his heart broken. So when he sees that Ara is about to hit Man-su, Gum-mo thinks that Ara is choosing him over the other guy because he’s mistaken Man-su for the guy his wife has been having an affair with. But he makes the biggest mistake in bragging about being the only man to own her heart. Ara’s not exactly the picture of emotional stability either. So she makes use of the mayhem to shoot her husband a second time, after Man-su already shot him once. Watching Ara celebrate her freedom with her new beau only strikes further terror into Man-su’s heart when he comes back at night to dig up the gun that Ara and her lover buried along with Gum-mo. What if his wife was cheating with him with the dentist at her workplace? Watching Miri dance with that young guy at the dance that she was supposed to go to with Man-su can’t be easy for him. But Miri is only lashing out because she’s kept in the dark while her husband’s been really sketchy lately. It would’ve been adorable how Miri and Man-su both believe that their partner is too good for them had it not been completely toxic and driven solely by insecurity. There’s plenty of love between them. That only adds fuel to the chaos that’s been their marriage thanks to Man-su. Oh yeah. He’s not always given Miri an easy time. Their current fight reveals a side to Man-su that you wouldn’t expect someone like him to possess. Apparently, Man-su was a drunk, and sometimes an abusive one at that. All the props to him for getting his act together and staying sober for 9 years. But I guess how you feel about Man-su in this particular debate depends on whether or not you believe that alcohol can’t bring out darkness unless some of it was already there. We’ve seen Man-su do crazy things all sober. So does it really make him a different man when he’s inebriated and far more volatile? Or does it merely aggravate the problems that are already there? Because by the time Man-su gets around to killing Go Si-jo, stuffing him in the trunk of his car, twisting him with metal wire like he does a bonsai, and stuffing him underneath an apple tree in his own yard, he’s a full blown maniac. But Man-su is not the only man in the house with a criminal response to financial panic. Si-one and his friend Dongho tried to loot Dongho’s dad, Wonno’s store and proceeded to get caught by the police. You’d think that Man-su would take this chance to be a good dad and talk some sense into Si-one. But Man-su’s more partial to his family than the stupid morals that never got them anywhere. So despite Si-one’s confession that he was the one to have come up with the idea to rob Wonno’s store, Man-su fiercely protects his family by blackmailing Wonno into dropping the charges. Wonno has taken enough from his family. You can imagine why Miri would be totally on board with burying the stolen goods in the yard and taking the win for once. If only she knew that that was barely the beginning of a long list of secrets the yard will come to hold. But everything they’re doing is to protect their family, for sure. Although I doubt that Man-su’s doing the right thing by letting Si-one have the cigarettes he found in his stash. I know this looks like Man-su’s trying to get into Si-one’s good books. But I think this is just his misdirected attempt at bonding with his son. Hardly his worst crime in the last few days.
Does Man-su’s family forgive him?
The snakes around Man-su’s arms on the poster of the film look just like the bonsai wire for a reason. In No Other Choice, the snakes show up just before Man-su, and even Ara, for that matter, are about to commit soul-corrupting crimes. Since they’re a symbolic presence in an absurdist descent into madness, the fact that a snake bit Man-su before he was able to hurt people was maybe nature’s attempt at intervening. But seeing as Man-su has no trouble tucking a corpse into his yard, I think nature was a tad bit late. What Man-su didn’t know while burying Go Si-jo was that Si-one was taking a puff on the roof and watching everything his dad was doing down below. Si-one does confide in Miri because he is terrified. But he might be too darn scared to even believe the details of what he saw. When Miri digs under the apple tree and finds the corpse her husband has buried, she makes a very ride-or-die move and keeps his secret. Her idea of love is unconditional, to the extent that she’s forcing herself to be okay with something she’s really not okay with. And I guess that comes from a place where she feels that there would be no bigger failure than another divorce. In lying to Si-one and telling him that there’s a pig buried under that tree, Miri’s desperately trying to hold the family together.
Man-su is trying to do the same thing by going after the last guy on his hit list. You’d think that after the visit from the detectives over the disappearance of his last two victims, Man-su would lay low for a while. But time is the last thing he has. And if he backs out now, he would’ve killed two men for nothing. Meeting Choi Sun-chul and getting to know the person beyond the wide smile doesn’t make it any easier for Man-su. If Choi Sun-chul’s childlike friendliness didn’t make the idea of killing him hard enough for Man-su, the man seems to be absolutely miserable. He’s got money. But he’s got no friends, and his wife wouldn’t move to be with him. When Man-su first thought of killing Choi Sun-chul, he was on the phone trying to convince his wife to come live with him. So it’s really too bad for Choi Sun-chul that he’s drinking to drown the pain of his failed marriage with the guy who plans to kill him tonight. It feels wrong to say that this isn’t easy for Man-su. But he does try to push his luck and save Choi Sun-chul from himself when he asks for a job at Moon Paper. If only that could happen! It would certainly have saved Choi Sun-chul from dying an excruciating death at the hands of his new friend. Man-su’s come a long way from leaving the bullet casing at the crime scene to staging a pretty convincing suicidal accident. It helps that the detectives in the town are absolute duds for the sake of Man-su’s absurd win. Instead of looking in Man-su’s direction, they bought the fabrication Ara improvised for them. To hide her own crime, Ara told the detectives that her husband went mad and left the house with his unregistered gun. They’re clearly in a hurry to close down the investigation. So because they can match the image of the gun that Ara identifies to the bullet casing they found at the crime scene where Go Si-jo was killed, they have conveniently concluded that Gum-mo went nuts, took off, and killed Go Si-jo. It’s a believable conclusion for them because Go Si-jo and Gum-mo represented their companies in a bid years ago. Ara twisted that around into a revenge story by claiming that Gum-mo might’ve wanted to kill Go Si-jo over an old bidding war he lost. What’s even better for Man-su? Solar Paper didn’t even take part in that bidding. So he’s off the hook for good. Well, only legally, that is.
Because even though it looks like Man-su has won in the ending of No Other Choice, a close inspection of his life would tell you that he’s lost much more than he realizes. He’s gone and gotten the job that would secure his and his family’s financial situation for the time being. It’s definitely not a coincidence that, at the interview, Man-su is told that he’ll be the only person working in his department, and that they’re cutting a big chunk of their workforce. This wasn’t a vigilante fight for Man-su. He killed his own kind. So it’s obvious that he’s made peace with the fact that only very few people in the paper industry will have jobs that pay enough for a life that can be lived beyond mere survival. But as the overarching metaphor, that’s a nihilistic truth that v accepts all crouched down and heavy. Miri’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes for a reason. She’s staying with Man-su despite everything he’s done out of a fear, guilt, a sense of powerlessness against her own insecurities. It’s sad how she doesn’t even hear the irony in her remark when she wonders how Si-one can still be friends with Dongho after what’s happened. It wasn’t long ago that Miri wondered how a married couple could break up over a big move. There’s a lot that Miri’s defeated spirit believes she should put up with as a divorcee, a wife, a mother, and a woman. But what’s worrisome is the silence between them as the family fractures over a quiet, shared trauma. The look on Si-one’s face when he looks at his dad is one of fear, not love. His mother’s comforting lies didn’t kill the nightmares. So when Si-one sleeps, his dad becomes a menacing figure he’s terrified of.
That’s a doomed family right there in the ending of No Other Choice. But the only good thing is that, after having the dogs back, Ri-one is playing her cello at home for the first time. It’s an experience that Miri has waited for for a long time. And who knows if this might convince Miri that helping her husband cover up all his crimes was worth it? For Man-su, it’s a cold, dark, AI-run hell on the first day of his job. It’s the most depressing job possible for someone who couldn’t imagine working without his friends at the start of the film. Looking at AI as the all-powerful, indomitable evil in the ending is how No Other Choice wants to predict the future. It’s not looking good. And there’s really not much that we can do about it. Man-su can take that outmoded stick and beat that roll of paper as a way to feel some sense of control over the AI-run factory. But AI will stay, grow, and destroy a lot of things long after Man-su is dead and buried.
