Chan Park-Wook’s latest film is a direct adaptation of Costa-Gavras’ 2005 thriller The Ax, which revolves around a paper mill worker who is laid off from his job and then seeks to eliminate all the local competition for a shrinking market of alternative positions. In this case the worker, Yoo Man-Su, is played by Lee Byung-hun, and the drama plays out within a distinctly South Korean economic landscape. In the opening scenes, we learn about the traditional South Korean approach to business, which is that a lifetime factory job can bring about the good life – a family, a home, financial security: “If you don’t start a union we guarantee a job for life.” The factory has subsidised Yoo’s education, assisting him with a higher degree so that he can take on a senior management role. By contrast, when an American conglomerate takes over Yoo’s factory they immediately cut the production line by 80%,  insisting, in a gesture of capitalist realism, that they have “no other choice,” the first words spoken in English in the film. In response, Yoo adopts the brutalist logic of the American company, conducting a rigorous hiring and interview process for a fake paper mill job, with the goal of murdering anyone who might conceivably form his future competition.

On the face of it then, No Other Choice is driven by the contrast between the natural South Korean way of doing business, which preserves social and familial unity, and the unnatural American way of doing business, which atomises society and families. Yet Park collapses this distinction from the very first scene, when we see Yoo ensconced in the utopian mise-en-scene of his family home, against a hyper-stylised sunset and tableau of falling leaves that is overtly digitally composited. From the very outset the good life is presented as a fantasy, meaning that Yoo’s quest to get back to a more natural state of capitalism is also a fantasy. In fact, his quest is primarily about preserving that fantasy – the idea that we can truly return to an economic “state of nature” in which all people are equal. To that end, Park floods the film with extraordinary houses and even more extraordinary vistas, as if to connote a world where wealth is so equally distributed that it somehow restores our proximity to nature and our “natural” selves. This contradiction crystallises around the greenhouse that adjoins Yoo’s own house. On the one hand, this is a space that signifies “nature,” and accordingly Yoo adopts it as his base of operations, in a gesture of defiance to the businessman who wants to tear it down to make way for a practice golf green. On the other hand, Yoo uses the greenhouse for bonsai, tortuously crafted and cultivated nature, and ends up turning one of his victims into a ghastly human bonsai there as well. Jutting out from the periphery of his mansion, the bonsai encapsulates the film’s fixation with the threshold between house and vista as a space where wealth might be finally naturalised.

Having started with a sentimental distinction between natural and unnatural capitalism – the distinction that forms the heart of Yoo’s vengeful fantasy – Park destabilises both nature and naturalism themselves in a riposte to the way they are used in the service of capitalist realism. We see this in the first murder scene, when Yoo, imagining himself as the avatar of nature, follows his victims into a sylvan space where they harvest mushrooms, only for nature to attack him, in the form of a snake bite. More generally, the experience of being laid off removes any residual naturalism from Yoo’s body, and from the bodies around him, which are thrown into abject and absurd relief. Upon being fired, Yoo attends a support group for laid-off workers. Virtually every member of this group has developed an odd facial or bodily tic in response to their trauma and these are only enhanced by the bizarre healing rituals demanded by the group leader. When Yoo tells his wife Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) that he has been fired, Park opts for arhythmic cross-editing that freezes both of them in surreal illegible poses. Likewise, when Yoo is interviewed for a position subordinate to someone he previously managed, a beam of sunlight prevents him from looking directly at the main interviewer, forcing him to dodge and squint around the glare as he composes his responses. Throughout all of these moments, Yoo has a deteriorating abscess around one of his teeth, which further offsets the stability and symmetry of his face, causing him to radiate an awry haptic world in which people are always stumbling, slipping and doing double takes (“Daddy’s not a very smooth driver”) but without ever quite rupturing the reality effect in its entirety. Naturalism is not replaced by surrealism but denatured and recreated many times, reflecting the toll that the destructive creation of capitalism takes upon the human body.

This denaturalisation creates a growing tension between the digitally composed fantasy of a natural capitalism and the blunt facticity of nature itself as a return of the repressed, a reminder that capitalism actually legitimates itself by making us believe that each previous iteration of it was a utopia that is only just out of reach in the present moment. We see this conflict between fantasy and facticity most vividly when the greenhouse collapses as the site of Yoo’s base of operations. This occurs when he trusses up one of his victims in bonsai to make it easier to bury him in the garden, an image that takes the film’s two versions of nature to their logical extreme – both our continuity with nature, as the corpse is returned to the earth beneath a mound of fertilizer, but also nature as an articifical construct, in the garish spectacle of the body tied and bound for a maximally efficient burial. Between these two poles of the film’s trajectory Yoo’s tooth finally comes loose, in an extreme close-up in which nature, and the body, refuse to allow themselves to be subsumed into the capitalist naturalist field that Yoo is trying to reinscribe, even as he believes that he is rupturing it. Hence the motif of paper, as both natural and artificial product, nature and commodity; the paper factory plays a similar role to the thresholds between houses and vistas, symbol of a lost conflation of nature and wealth, a naturalisation of wealth, that Yoo makes it his vengeful business to recover. Park playfully suggests that cinema occupies the same role when one of Park’s earliest victims responds to his fake job advertisement with a cover letter in which he explains that his love of analog media makes him the ideal candidate for a paper mill factory. Media here occupies the same logic as capitalism, forcing us to feel nostalgia for the iteration that just ended as a more “natural” way of experiencing the economic coordinates of our world, in contrast to the (only recently) degraded present.

Beneath its hypermaximalist surface No Other Choice, like Decision to Leave before it, is thus beset with a pervasive anhedonia, a distrust about the capacity of cinema to generate change. As with Decision to Leave, we see that play out in the sheer proliferation of mobile phones throughout the narrative. In the third act Yoo learns that his son has spent months stealing thousands of cell phones from local businesses and then selling them online in an effort to supplement the family finances. This sudden explosion of mobile phones has an ambivalent relation to Yoo’s fantasy of the good life – on the one hand, it fractures the stately cinematic mise-en-scene of the opening sequence with family and house; on the other hand, it speaks to the virtual and digitised element of his fantasy. In both cases, it forces him to recognise his fantasy of “natural” capitalism as fantasy, paving the way for the extraordinary conclusion, in which Yoo does indeed get hired again by a paper factory. The catch is that he is the only employee on a production line that is otherwise entirely governed by AI. As Park dwarfs Yoo with an automatic tree harvester in the closing moments, it suddenly feels like his fantasy of a capitalist state of nature has only served to embed him further in capitalism’s own ecology and evolutionary scheme – he has become a mere node in a hybridisation of economics and environments, an imminent singularity.