It isn’t fair to Park Chan-wook to compare his new film, No Other Choice, to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, just because both men hail from South Korea. In fact, Park might particularly not like that comparison, given that Bong has essentially surpassed him on the world stage as South Korea’s preeminent filmmaker. But you can’t really escape the fact that this is Park’s own Parasite-like satirical look at the world’s changing economy and the desperate measures to which it drives its victims, with perhaps this unexpected twist: It’s even more of a comedy than certainly anything Park has made, and perhaps anything the more overtly comedic Bong has made as well.

Lee Byung-hun plays Man-su, a paper company executive who believes he has everything: a secure job which has just recently seen him honoured with an award, a beautiful family home, a loving wife (Son Ye-jin) and two children in their teens and preteens (Woo Seung Kim and So Yul Choi). As Park establishes a sense of purposeful broadness from the very start, Man-su, while barbecuing for his family, amasses them in a group hug and proclaims “I have everything I need.” The only greater kiss of death is when retiring police officers answer one last call on their final day of work.

Indeed paper companies are one of the obvious casualties of our collective shift online, but in this case it’s also steady corporate conglomeration that is the culprit. An American company buys out Solar Paper, leaving Man-su without work, vowing to return to gainful employment within three months in the same field where he’s amassed decades of expertise. Thirteen months later, the best he can do is moving big boxes in a warehouse, and the family has long since began cutting back on most “luxuries” – including, gasp, their Netflix subscription. It’s time to do something big and unwise.

What exactly this is does not take too long to reveal, but it applies Park’s fondness for baroque narrative structures to the contours of an absurd – a very blackly absurd – comedy. Suffice it to say that Man-su needs to suss out his competition for the few remaining paper industry jobs at the executive level, as most of these people are also out of work and nearing an equal level of desperation. So he puts a fake job ad online, sees who responds, and becomes intimately involved in their lives, with an unimaginable array of results.

No Other Choice had the other choice to go about this more sombrely, and Park has often gone this route in his other work. Instead, both he and his star – who played the villain in the final two seasons of Squid Game – delight in the opportunity to let loose and go wild a bit. There’s no doubt this can be quite funny from moment to moment, to the point that it sometimes risks undercutting the larger points Park wants to make. In typical Park form, the film unspools itself over a particularly long period of time, especially for a comedy, as it doesn’t wrap up until the two hour and 20-minute mark. The digressions have digressions, and there are points when you wonder if this would all hit harder if it stayed on message better.

The other thing that keeps No Other Choice from reaching its maximum potential impact is that the things we alluded to in the opening, that it is bringing us an economic satire that felt a lot more trenchant when Bong did it six years ago with Parasite. Even as delightfully as Choice is conceived and executed, there’s a nagging sense that Park is late to the party. Certainly, the line about Man-su having everything he needs is so on-the-nose that we can’t help but interpret it as part of the satire, so Park can be said to be offering us a familiar setup in order to branch it off in unfamiliar ways. And while it does work on that level, that nagging sense never fully goes away.

For this critic, though, Choice is certainly a return to form after Decision to Leave, the director’s 2022 film that really tested viewer patience by plunging on for another 45 minutes beyond its apparent ending. This film returns us to wanting more of Park’s unique sensibilities, which he uses primarily to make us laugh for the first time in his career – and does so quite successfully.

 

No Other Choice opens tomorrow in cinemas.