No Other Choice’s Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung-hun on the darkly funny and deadly work satire

“I am a lawyer”, “I am a chef”, “I am a teacher” or “I am a pilot”.

When we describe ourselves or our jobs, we use the “I am”, rather than say “I work as a lawyer”.

Just that seemingly small distinction reveals that for many people, our identities are intrinsically linked to what we do for work.

Even though the institutions of work generally don’t serve employees (Australians work longer hours than our OECD cousins, often without overtime pay), we still labour, literally, under a system which takes more from us than it gives back.

That’s definitely the case for Yoo Man-su, the lead character in No Other Choice, a biting comedy-drama-satire from South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook.

Man-su, played with frenetic desperation by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun, is a houseproud family man with a wife, two kids, two dogs and a greenhouse full of bonsai trees. He loves a long all-in hug, and to dance with his wife.

He’s worked for the same paper company for a quarter of a decade, and has as much reverence for paper as others might for 20-year-old single malt scotch.

Man-su’s company has been bought by American investors and they have “no other choice” but to cut his job. Like many men his age and professional level, he finds himself chanting mantras about self-worth in an outplacement program for the retrenched.

Working for the same company your whole life is a thing of the past, and many people know the sting of redundancy, insecure employment and the widening chasm between what a chief executive earns versus his (almost always a he) average worker.

Which makes Man-su a relatable character. Well, until, that is, a year later, he still can’t find a comparable managerial position in his industry, and he decides to, as you do, kill off his competition, literally. He has “no other choice”.

No Other Choice premiered at the Venice Film Festival in late August, where it was in competition for the Golden Lion, and in the audience that night was Lee and his wife. She told her actor husband that she couldn’t feel empathy towards his onscreen alter ego, he recalled the next day.

A dark and highly compromised anti-hero is a specialty of Park, whose films including the violent Old Boy and the sensual The Handmaiden have made big splashes internationally. Old Boy, in particular, has a character journey that challenges the audience’s ability to get behind its protagonist.

Lee understood why his wife couldn’t put herself in Man-su’s shoes.

“This film is very peculiar,” he said. “If his situation was absolutely desperate, and he comes to this extreme measure, then we would understand, ‘Oh, I would do that too, I would kill too’.

“You would be there for him. But that’s not it. (Man-su) has things, he’s not going to die. He got laid off, and, yes, that’s terrible, but he has other things. He is not going to starve, but he’s so driven (by trying) to go back to his status quo, where he felt he had it all, he wants to restore that.

“There will be some people who understand the journey and really root for him, but then other people will say, ‘no, it’s too much’. The reactions to our protagonist will be different, it will diverge. That’s the point of this film.”

Not many filmmakers would’ve had the daring to create a character with a taste for unjustifiable homicide and place him inside a dark comedy.

Park read the book, The Ax by Donald Westlake, he based his film on two decades earlier, and had spent years trying to bring it to screen. The book is American so Park originally wanted to do it in the US, but found the funding situation difficult.

He kept making movies, and mostly in South Korea, so eventually, he pivoted the story’s setting. While No Other Choice is distinctly Korean in its textures and contours (for example, the characters’ relationships with alcohol), that story about loss of purpose, economic desperation and toxic work and aspiration culture is universal.

In the 20 years since he read the book, the conversation has also shifted, and he added an AI element to its closing scenes that reads like a sci-fi horror. “I wanted to create something like The Terminator,” he said.

But for all of its heavy, even triggering, themes and its violence, No Other Choice is funny. Darkly, uncomfortably so. One scene involving three characters, a very loud music track and a frenetic grab for a weapon will be etched in memories.

If you remove yourself from that scene, it’s inappropriate to laugh, in the moment, it’s the only reaction.

“I thought from the very beginning, if I took the very tragic situations and circumstances that these characters are put in, and did it plainly, and conveyed it as a sad story, it’s not going to be a fun watch. It’s not going to be intriguing and it will not make for a unique film.

“So, I wanted to put a different spin on it, a different take where you amplify the tragic-ness of it all through humour.”

That’s a signature Park combination. After decades of exploring the psychology of these highly flawed, sometimes actually just awful, characters, he doesn’t profess to have a better understanding of the dark sides of human nature.

“But what I want to do is to tell the stories of the possibility of there being hidden, deep inside one’s inner mind, dark desires – and that these are harboured by ordinary people.

“At the same time, while telling those stories, I also want to say that we must not give up on empathy.”

Asked what his dark desire was, he replied, jokingly and very on theme to the film, “Maybe pay a visit to all of the other directors whose films are competing with No Other Choice”.

No Other Choice is in cinemas on Thursday, January 15