‘Oldboy’ Director Park Chan-wook’s New Movie Is Like a Bloodier Version of ‘The Office’
David Brent never committed any acts of violence and Jim Halpert didn’t murder a man in cold blood (that we know of, at least), but now acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook has made a corporate satire about the paper industry with more than a few grisly death scenes.
The new movie from the director of Oldboy and Decision to Leave, No Other Choice, made its world premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival before playing at the Toronto International Film Festival, nabbing the International People’s Choice Award at the latter.
Don't Miss
No Other Choice stars Korean superstar and Squid Game baddie Lee Byung-hun as a family man named Man-soo, who loses his job working at a paper company and can’t seem to land another one. After cutting costs by sending the family’s two dogs away and putting their house up for sale, he decides to take drastic action. Man-soo concocts a plan to determine his top competitors for a job opening at a successful new paper company and bump them off.
While frequently suspenseful and unnerving, No Other Choice is primarily a very dark comedy. And seeing as how it all focuses on the paper business, some critics have cited The Office in their reviews. Although, to be fair, none of the graphic murder scenes come close to being as difficult to watch as “Scott’s Tots.”
The paper industry reference has nothing to do with The Office, it stems from the film’s source material: the 1997 novel The Ax by legendary crime fiction author Donald E. Westlake. Even though No Other Choice is set in the modern day, the choice to leave the paper-based aspects of the story intact accentuates the absurdity of the violence.
Not only is the protagonist waging war on his fellow unemployed middle-class sad sacks (while expressing no rage toward the corporate bigwigs who fired him), he’s doing this to land a job in an increasingly irrelevant industry. His extreme actions are more about maintaining a pre-conceived sense of status and identity than securing a stable future for his family.
And even though The Office began in the pre-smartphone era, Wernham Hogg and Dunder Mifflin were already showing signs of being doomed, thanks to big-box store competitors like Staples.
In both The Office and No Other Choice, the drabness of the paper business really accentuates the soul-draining demands of the job, whether that involves violence or just putting up with Michael Scott’s constant HR violations.
Actually, come to think of it, there was one character on The Office who, as far as we're concerned, likely committed a series of horrific murders.
