Today is the day my late friend Adrean Darce Brent chose as her birthday; she told me once that the process took long enough that she had more than one day that could be considered so, but having to choose she went with that date. She died before her last birthday which I didn’t find out until then. She was always an enigma in many ways; we had to show ID one time when we were going into the Paramount Studios for a sneak peak viewing. It was the first time I realised she was much older than me. We met at USC in the masters program AKA how I got out of Michigan to somewhere warm and went to a lot of movies. I don’t know the path she took there; I do know that she changed to her chosen name and went through the courts to do so. Her family was in Boston but she didn’t go back there or speak of them. She wasn’t the kind of person who opened up about much. After a traumatic event, she stayed over at my little studio apartment for a night, but only a night as I had my cat Colette and she was very allergic. But we saw a lot of movies and some plays together. I saw her when she moved to Belgium and a few times after she moved back to Los Angeles. I miss those relatively (compared to today) carefree days of moviegoing. There were always so many opportunities in L.A. I remember when I got my first car. We ‘celebrated’ by going to a Werner Herzog double feature at the New Beverley. Wild women, eh?

So it seems the right way to be thinking about her to talk about seeing a great movie, No Other Choice. Though first let me talk about Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax which is the source of it. When I was in Hudson I stopped by the library there to pick it up. It was in the catalogue as being on the shelf but nope. Turns out it was in the history room: local author. I so associate him with NYC I was nonplussed. He and his wife moved up to Ancram. Huh. The novel certainly shows a wide swath of western Connecticut and eastern New York which he seems to have driven through enough to write in good detail.

If you want to avoid spoilers, this would be a good place to stop. Short answer: novel, good. Film, even better.

There is an earlier film version by Costa-Gavras who’s a bit of a blind spot for me so I have no idea how that is. The novel is set in the late 90s when neoliberalism was really starting to take off with all the deregulation and greedy executive salary focus (i.e. company success was measured not in overall health but in compensation of CEOs). As you might expect, it’s very much a work of its time with all that implies about social and gender-based attitudes. We are very much only in the head of Burke Devore, middle-aged middle management who gets the ax in a now familiar pattern of ‘cost-cutting’ which generally means as much or more money at the top, more work at the bottom and fewer people to do it. Devore is aware of the growing tide of mechanisation, relating his sufferings to those of his parents’ generation in the Great Depression, even imagining the rise of industrialism having the same effect.

But he’s also plain about the fact that yeah, things are tough all over, but what about ME? It’s impossible to get away from the sense of entitlement he has that papers over his master plan of killing the competition in the region who would apply for the job he will open up by ultimately killing the person holding it in a company that looks healthier than the one he was in that shut down. He comes close to confessing it in one of the therapy sessions his wife makes him attend after she admits to having an affair. When he realises that the therapist is becoming aghast at what he’s saying, he diverts. He even reconciles himself to Marjorie’s affair in part because it’s expeditious but also he sees he was wrong to cut her out completely of his thoughts. Clearly, he cannot tell her about the murders but also he doesn’t let her know how bad things are economically — and yet, as so many women are trained to do, she has already been cutting everything to the bone, just in case.

Their relationship turns around when he handles their son being picked up for a crime with ruthless efficiency and a complete lack of self pity. She’s impressed and it shows. She trusts him again. He takes it as a sign that he is on the right track. Occasionally the reality of what he’s doing does affect him. One particularly brutal murder affects him enough to slow down the careful plan. But in the end it’s the ‘only way’ to solve the problems and he deserves to have that job.

The action and the plotting are superb of course; Westlake’s skilled jigsaw snaps together nicely. But reading it from our time it’s hard to get beyond that sense of privilege he readily assumes.

Park Chan-wook takes this material and makes it so very moving and so emblematic of this moment. Neoliberalism partnering with not only automation but AI has every company working overtime to cut every possible worker so the CEOs can swim in money. Yes, it’s unsustainable, but they’re all trying to do it. And everything is worse. Everything.

Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) goes along much the same journey, with the same sense of responsibility but he’s more desperate than entitled. Although I liked Glen Weldon’s review for NPR, where he wrote, ‘it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.’ Park spends more time on the men humbled to go through unemployment therapy (all tapping away) in a way that builds sympathy in a way Burke’s lone wolf does not.

But it’s also much more gruesome! And funny. And sweet. The family is very much at the heart of the film and we don’t lose sight of that. Right at the start we get the oh-no moment of a happy family all declaring life is perfect so you know everything is about to be terrible. Miri (Son Ye-jin) adapts like Marjorie, economising and taking a part time job. The kids are individuals, too. Si-One (Woo Sung Kim) gaming addicted which leads to his own crimes, and Ri-one (So Yul Choi) who unlike the college coed who barely makes it into the novel is an autistic musical prodigy — or so her parents are told, as she won’t play for them. And then there’s the two golden retrievers that go to live with the in-laws as a cost cutting measure. Ri-one takes to hiding in the doghouses to express her grief.

Like so many criminal narratives you can’t help thinking ‘if you’d only put the same energy into something useful…’ but Tom Ripley does not change his spots (to mix metaphors). The rigidity of pursing the ‘only choice’ regardless of what happens takes its toll, but it is the only choice.

Park is such a beautiful filmmaker that you wince a lot and laugh a lot and you stay sympathetic to the murderer because you can feel his love for his family. A lot of that is Lee who shows every emotion even in the midst of gruesome absurdities — oh my the absurdities, and what a cast — as we see his many failings and (as in the novel) lucky breaks, and the final determination that they can never leave their home. It’s a motivation at the start and a requirement by the end, a house that’s been filled with love but also one with a long history of suffering, too.

The emotions are all present in a way that they’re sidelined in the novel and that’s what makes the final ‘triumph’ both moving and chilling in myriad ways.

You would have loved this film, Adrean.