No Other Choice rewrites the modern thriller?

With Park Chan-wook the image is not just about telling: it signs. It is a stamp imprinted in the frame, a way of being inside the light that is recognizable even before "understanding" what is happening. Cinema, in his hands, ceases to be only a narrative and returns to be an optical test: a photographic gesture that takes by the eyes and forces to look according to his rules. It is the same automatism with which my generation, raised in front of the TV, separates in half a second an old anime from a western animation product. It is not a reasoning, it is a reflection: a line, a cut, a visual grammar that belongs to a world and reveals it instantly. Chan-wook works there, on that invisible boundary between recognizing and remembering, where style becomes identity and identity becomes the destiny of image.

It is from this point, from the recognition that precedes understanding, that one enters in No Other Choice, the last film of the South Korean artist, a film that is the triumph of the Antony latensification, a film where the actions of the protagonist combine with the transition, creating a unique fluidity: a feature film where the story blends with the medium and appears on the screen, always through that light that first prints and then returns.

His latest film is a masterpiece and, precisely for this reason, it is striking that it is still read with that somewhat predictable reflection of those who, to stand out, prefer to distance themselves. Here there is no exercise of style itself: there is a full opera, which comes at the end of a prolific career and after a title released just two years ago, passed to the ears of the general public.

The new film is presented with the same disruptive charge of Parasite: a South Korean film capable of overturning the western imagination. It arrives in Venice and impresses. It comes up on the screen and amazes. Not for a simple plot twist, but for the precision with which it transforms a social context into a narrative engine.

The plot, at first glance, seems "the same" as many stories of the Asian country: a labor-based society, where those who act almost correspond to the background, because those who suffer end up becoming active in a distorted way. The individual tries to act, but their actions fail to shake off the mire of non-work in which they find themselves. So change is needed. A breakthrough that would have nothing heroic and nothing edifying, if it were not for our protagonist deciding that "if I can’t work in the paper industry because there are no places, I will make those places available for me". I will make sure to continue my life "as if nothing had happened".

"As if nothing were" in the eyes of those outside the family unit, those who don’t know what’s under the apple tree at the end of the film, those who don’t know that, for Man-soo, work in a paper mill is everything, as well as for South Korean society. Everything, to the point of making you a murderer.

And this is where Park rewrites the modern thriller. Man-soo becomes a killer, but he is not capable of being the way that gender has accustomed us to imagine him for decades. He can’t hold a gun. He can’t hide "in the right way". He can’t persuade. He does not know how to embody that monolithic coldness which, in cliché, reduces the killer to just two things: control and killing.

And Man-soo still retains something incompatible with the classic idea of the killer: empathy. He even goes so far as to try in any way possible to get Koo Beom-mo out of the house, not for a flawless strategy, but to avoid exposing his wife’s betrayal. A gesture that a "normal killer", in the more stereotyped grammar of thriller, would never do.

That clumsiness is not a detail: it becomes a sign of the times. The awkwardness characterizes today’s society, the inability to live to the end, the inability to really do those things that - perhaps - before a human being, with coldness and determination, would have made to be able to eat.

Here necessity produces incompetence, produces confusion, clumsiness, errors. And it is precisely these errors that raise the tension, because the weave does not proceed as a straight line: it stumbles, deviates, gets tangled, gets dirty. The modern thriller, in this form, is not the tale of a professional evil: it is the chronicle of a man dragged into a fate for which he is not made.

Perhaps this is also what makes this "Parkian" film different from the Joon-ho film. There the family plots and somehow enjoys it, at least up to a certain point: there is a pleasure of play, a lucidity of the plan, a collective energy that transforms deception into system.

The father, on the other hand, slowly turns nasty because he must, not because he wants to. Hardens by necessity, not vocation. And when the price comes, it remains the idea that he did not do so without any consequences, without a painful understanding within the family.

The director makes even more bitter and atrocious the actions of Man-soo, who does not bear the burden alone, but unknowingly has loaded it on his entire family, the one he wanted to protect and uplift with the actions he carried out.

It is not a triumph of cunning: it is the deformation of an ordinary life, pushed beyond the limit by a society in which work is not only a means, but identity, value, right to exist.

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Fonte immagine:
Marie Claire Korea, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons