Keswick Film Club - Reviews - No Other Choice

Where is the line drawn between taking away a livelihood, and a life? In the modern age, people never get sacked — just downsized, rightsized and let go. The real meaning has never changed, though, a brutal truth well captured in The Ax, a 1997 satirical novel about redundancy by US writer Donald E Westlake. Adapting the book into a midnight-dark comedy, virtuoso South Korean director Park Chan-wook nudges the title back towards the polite: No Other Choice. But the implicit violence of lowering a headcount is soon put front and centre. Restructuring has never been so bloody. The knives are out from the start. When we first meet protagonist Man-su, he is a model of a certain kind of traditional male success. The house is gated, the mother of his children, Mi-ri, a stay-at-home wife. Meat cooks on the barbecue. The film's first sly joke is framing that scene like a primal triumph — really, Man-su is a soft-handed manager at a large paper manufacturer. The second is what brutish instincts arise once Man-su is dispensed with.

Amid painful household economies, there is soon no meat on the barbecue, or even in the soup that Mi-ri makes her husband and the kids. (In another mordant touch, the couple's son is left more distraught by the cancellation of Netflix.) So to the grisly heart of the matter. Faced with too many unemployed rivals for too few executive positions, Man-su decides to do more than polish his CV. Instead, he will start killing off the competition. Rightfully a darling of film lovers, Park has left an auteurist signature on all kinds of genres: berserker revenge story 'Old Boy', lavish period kink with 'The Handmaiden', a sad Hitchcocky romance in 'Decision to Leave'. Here, as Man-su turns murderous, the dial is set to antic comedy. This being Park, the slapstick also has symphonic brilliance, and sometimes even a mad kind of beauty.

A fantastic film from a Director at the very top of his game.