No Other Choice

Grade: B-

No Other Choice is one of those darkly funny disaster thrillers where someone accidentally does something bad – and in their attempts to cover it up and make everything okay again, it all gets worse and worse. It usually involves doing more bad things along the way. It’s from Korea. They tend to do thrillers very well. I suppose it was unreasonable to expect another Parasite, but No Other Choice ultimately has enough going for it to earn my recommendation.

It falls into a category that you could call “tension porn.” You keep watching just to see how far out of control everything will spiral. Breaking Bad and the 1998 film Very Bad Things come to mind. Our main character, when we first meet him, is a regular guy who had never done anything criminal in his life – but boy does he ever by the end. Desperation drives him to it. In that respect, I thought of Channing Tatum in Roofman.

Man-su has been a devoted employee of 25 years for the paper-making company Solar Paper. When Americans swoop in and buy out the company, Man-su is a victim of the layoffs. He is in danger of losing his home – his pride and joy – and his family might be uprooted. They already have to temporarily have their dogs live with their in-laws because they can’t afford to feed as many mouths, as they put it.

This sends Man-su down a rabbit hole of unsavory deeds to make money for his family, by any means necessary. It begins with some light deception and fraud, and before we know it, he’s stalking, capturing, and even in need of body disposal. The most nerve wracking part is how he juggles all of this while putting on a good face for his family, who remains oblivious to the depths he has been reduced to. Sometimes he has to clean himself up and hope he doesn’t smell suspicious.

The Tension Porn tropes are paraded on, but otherwise, No Other Choice works as well as it does because of the look of the movie. There are so many scenes and shots that would be great to show in a film class, for various reasons. There’s a segment that I can see Tarantino being proud of and championing. I normally don’t pay much mind to scene transitions, but these are some of the most creative I’ve ever seen.

The ending is too much of a safe, soft landing. Man-su put his fellow characters and the audience through the wringer, only for everything to somehow be ok. No Other Choice throws so much at us, and is the king of the callbacks. Lines, words, phrases and moments come back into play several more times, as if to say “Remember this thing from earlier? Here it is again, with a different significance/meaning this time.” However, where it falls short or comes off as hackneyed on a narrative level, it consistently succeeds on a technical level. If you like Tension Porn, and/or if you can appreciate some well-constructed camera work, I think you’ll get into No Other Choice. You’ll hear that title so many times throughout the movie.

Grade: B-