No Other Choice review: 'Deliriously entertaining' South Korean masterpiece is this year's Parasite

Oldboy and The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook has premiered a "bleakly hilarious" comedy about economic anxiety at the Venice Film Festival, and it could be a huge international hit.

In 2019, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to awestruck acclaim, and went onto be an Oscar-winning international hit. No Other Choice could be this year's equivalent. The latest masterpiece from Park Chan-wook, who directed Oldboy (2003) and co-produced Bong's Snowpiercer (2013), it's another deliriously entertaining and continually surprising South Korean film which rails against today's economic realities, and which boasts an imaginatively staged death or two. Also, both films revolve around a gorgeous family home.

The house in question is owned by You Man-su, played by Lee Byung-hun (the Front Man in Squid Game). He was born there, and as an adult he dedicated himself to buying and restoring it, so now it's a perfect woodland home for him, his loving wife (Son Ye-jin), and their two children. "You know what I think now," he muses at the opening of the film, as he barbecues an eel in the blossom-filled front garden. "I've got it all." Uh oh.

After painting this cheekily ominous picture of domestic bliss, Park wastes no time in shredding it. Man-su has worked in the same paper factory for 25 years, and is proud to have won a "pulp man of the year" award, so he is shocked when the factory's new American owners start cutting jobs, his included. The film then offers a heartrending, but bleakly hilarious account of the humiliation of being downsized. Man-su and his former colleagues are encouraged to sit in a circle, chanting self-affirmation slogans while tapping their temples. And when he asks for an afternoon off his temporary shelf-stacking job so that he can attend an interview, he is stripped of his boilersuit, and has to leave the building in his underwear.

A year later, the family is forced to make painful economies: no more Netflix! In a further three months, they will have to sell their cherished house to a neighbour they loathe. It's at this point that Man-su forms a desperate plan. If he murders the person who has the job he wants, and murders everyone in the area who might be qualified for the same job, then his worries will be over. But he hasn't realised what a messy and complicated business murder can be. And he hasn't realised that, as fellow "pulp men", his targets will be uncomfortably similar to him. Essentially, he will be trying to kill different versions of himself.

No Other Choice is adapted from Donald E Westlake's 1997 novel, The Axe, which was turned into a film by Costa-Gavras in 2005, but Park makes it his own, fashioning a macabre, moving black comedy that boasts the most rib-tickling serial-killing spree since Kind Hearts and Coronets. Man-su could be seen as a distant relation of the hammer-wielding anti-hero in Park's classic revenge thriller, Oldboy, as both men are ordinary citizens who are turned into assassins when their lives are suddenly upended. But the tone of his new film is so different that, if you hadn't seen Oldboy, Lady Vengeance or The Handmaiden, you might guess that Park had been making rollicking tragicomedies throughout his career.

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No Other Choice delivers everything from sly running jokes to hysterical knockabout farce. One botched execution attempt, during which music is playing so loudly that the potential killer and his potential victim can't hear each other speak, is a sublime physical-comedy set piece. And Park packs every scene with wit, visual flair, and telling personal details. He keeps revealing key fragments of Man-su's back story, and putting in colourful digressions concerning toothache, cello lessons, and a fancy-dress ballroom dancing party. Life goes on, after all, even when you're killing people. The genius of the film is that all of these miscellaneous elements add something vital to the scenario, and the gruesome parts, the poignant parts and the riotously silly parts fit snugly together.

They all help to underline the same point, too. Right up until the final, searingly satirical sequence, Park never lets us forget that his blood-stained protagonist was once an average middle-aged family man who wanted nothing more than to do his job. No Other Choice Isn't just Park's funniest film, but his most humane, too – and that's quite something for a comedy as violent as this one.

★★★★★

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