Park Chan-wook, South Korea’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, has taken an old American crime novel and turned it into an allegory for our times. When Donald E. Westlake published The Ax in 1997, he was responding to the growing practice of U.S. manufacturers relocating overseas, to places where materials and labour costs are significantly cheaper. This meant bigger profits for the company and its shareholders, but unemployment for local workers. It spelled the death-knell of the ‘good corporate man’ who might have spent his entire life in one industry, working for a single company. Costa-Gavras made an adaptation of The Ax in 2005 that dealt with this dilemma. The new corporate threat that Park explores is the rise of AI, which promises even greater carnage in the workplace.
In No Other Choice, we follow the fortunes of Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged manager at a paper factory, who is living the bourgeois dream, with a wife, two kids, and a big house in the suburbs. We realise at once this kind of satisfaction is too good to last, and it’s not long before Manu-su is given his marching orders, following the purchase of his company by an American firm.
What follows is a painful series of humiliations, as Man-su attends workshops in which sacked workers sit around and chant, “It’s not my fault I was retrenched”, or words to that effect. The growth of automation has made the jobs pool contract so rapidly there is nothing on offer, even for the most qualified workers. Having reached the end of his tether, Manu-su arrives at a high-risk strategy to get back in the game.