Park Chan-wook, the eminent director of Oldboy and Stoker, is about to start filming his latest thriller – No Other Choice.
Update 21st August 2024: In the original version of this story, we took The Hollywood Reporter’s lead and billed Park Chan-wook’s next film as I Can’t Help It.
Reps from the production company CJ ENM have since contacted us to state that the official title for Park’s thriller is in fact No Other Choice. We’ve updated the following piece accordingly.
Our original story follows…
16th August 2024: Acclaimed director Park Chan-wook has begun work on his latest movie, it’s been announced. Called No Other Choice, it’s based on The Ax – one of the later novels by prolific novelist Donald E Westlake.
Filming is due to begin this Saturday – the 17th August if you’re reading this in the future – and will star Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Published in 1996, The Ax introduced Burke Devore, a middle-aged chemist who, when he loses his job at a paper firm during a round of cost-cutting, goes to violent lengths in order to get his job back. There’s black comedy as well as violence in the story, then, which sounds of a piece with some of Park’s best-known films, such as Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and his English-language debut Stoker – which made our best films on Disney Plus list earlier this week.
Lee Byung-hun – a superstar in Korea whose work includes Park’s Joint Security Area and hit Netflix series Squid Game – will star as the protagonist, here named Man-soo. Son Ye-jin will play his wife, Mi-ri.
Westlake’s novel was previously adapted in 2005 by another respected filmmaker, Costa-Gavras, which relocated the novel’s plot to France; Jose Garcia played the protagonist in that version of the story, called Le Couperet (or The Axe).
In a career spanning decades, US author Westlake largely worked in the crime thriller genre, and is perhaps best known for his Parker series of novels, beginning with The Hunter in 1962. A tough career criminal, Parker’s exploits have been adapted into films several times over the years, most famously by John Boorman in the classic Point Blank (1967), Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999) and Jason Statham action flick Parker (2013).
Shane Black is currently working away on his own Parker adaptation – Play Dirty, which will star Mark Wahlberg as Parker.
No Other Choice will likely be a very different beast from Black’s crime caper, though, with both the source novel and Costa-Gavras’ previous adaptation being a pitch-black satire of corporate brutality.
There’s no release date set for Park’s latest film yet, but it’ll likely emerge at some point in 2025. We’ll keep you posted.
