How ‘No Other Choice’ Turns a House Into a Capitalist Nightmare

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “No Other Choice” didn’t endure quite as impossible a quest as its protagonist, but it’s close. After he gets laid off, career man Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) eventually decides that he must hunt down and kill all his potential rivals for the vanishingly rare jobs in the paper-making business, the rock upon which he has built his life. The film has to guide the audience through the wild tonal swings of all those murder-plots and the threat they place on Man-su’s family, and it does so with exhilarating visual flourishes and inventiveness. But one of the hardest pieces of the movie to get right, according to director Park Chan-wook , was the house for which Man-su’s willing to kill. The house situates the history and economic limitations of Man-su’s circumstances, but it still has to look like the middle-class capitalist dream he’s chasing. “We had to find this house and design this house that could satisfy both requirements. We had to find this perfect midpoint,” Park told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast . “So even before the actual pre-production process had begun, we had already started location scouting for the perfect house. We searched all over Korea and managed to find this house from back in the day, when people called house merchants, that were involved in the real estate business, would build a bunch of similar-looking houses to sell, like a cookie-cutter-style house.” There used to be houses of that cookie-cutter style, built quickly to simulate a more luxurious idea of home ownership for the buyers than they might otherwise be able to achieve, all over Korea. A lot of them have since been taken down. Finding one of the rare ones still left allowed Director Park and his production team to imbue a sense of that history into the design. Each corner of the property, from the barbecue and picnic tables to the twin doghouses, is a visual representation of that middle-class dream that Man-su doesn’t want to wake up from. “This architectural design was an imitation of a European style - they actually used to call this a French-style house, even though there was no actual association or relationship with French architecture at all. It was just born from this admiration for European culture, and it’s a representation of the greed of the Korean middle class,” Park said. “When you really think about it, it doesn’t really reflect elegant taste at all.” Starting with that resonant base for the house, Park and his team added the wavy concrete design texture on the exterior, adding a little bit of a brutal(ist), unyielding touch and making the house a castle that Man-su wants to defend. But even the traditionally...

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