The late crime novelist Donald E. Westlake is well known for his humorous capers featuring the often unlucky thief John Dortmunder, beginning with 1970’s The Hot Rock, which inspired a film starring Robert Redford, and ending with 2009’s Get Real, published the year after Westlake’s death. In these lighthearted stories, Dortmunder and his crew undertake complex heists in which something almost always goes awry.

Westlake is also famous for another, far grimmer series, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark; these books focus on a thief named Parker, whose adventures frequently involve exacting violent revenge on those who’ve betrayed him. The first book, 1962’s The Hunter, inspired the classic 1967 film Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin.

Westlake’s stand-alone thriller The Ax (1997) effectively combines elements of both series, with a plot involving meticulous plans, multiple murders, and a tone that moves between clever satire and rage against the false promises of the American dream. It’s been adapted once before, in 2005, as a movie directed by celebrated filmmaker Costa-Gavras. A new film version, No Other Choice, by acclaimed director Park Chan-wook, premieres in U.S. theaters on Dec. 25.

The original novel focuses on Burke Devore, a middle-aged former manager in Connecticut who was laid off after two decades at the paper company Halcyon Mills. For almost two years, he’s sent out countless resumes and had numerous job interviews, but with no luck. Every time a position becomes available, someone else snaps it up: “Why him, why that guy with the sloppy grin or the huge ears or the rotten haircut? Why not me?” Burke becomes so desperate, in fact, that when the perfect position becomes available at a company called Arcadia, he crafts a plan to eliminate the competition. His scheme—which he keeps from his loving wife, Marjorie—involves deception, interstate travel, and coldblooded murder.

Burke narrates the story with chilling calculation, depersonalizing his quarry by referring to them only by their initials and shrugging off rare twinges of conscience. But as he carries out his deadly plans, things inevitably go wrong, forcing him to improvise—and such moments are tense and riveting. At one point, he’s forced to kill someone other than his target in broad daylight; at another, he unexpectedly chats with a future victim at a diner and is disturbed by how much they have in common. Even his strong marriage shows serious signs of fraying. Along the way, Burke—and Westlake—sharply critique the American way of doing business, in which experienced workers’ lives are ruined by the caprices of cost-conscious business leaders. In one dryly humorous exchange, Burke confirms to a police detective that he’d been “downsized”:

“A lot of that going around,” he suggests.
I say, “Not in your business, I think.”
He laughs a little self-consciously. “Oh, well, crime,” he says. “A growing industry.”
“I wonder why,” I say.

Park’s film isn’t very interested in the book’s Hitchcockian thrills, but it does retain the focus on social commentary. It moves the action to South Korea, where Yoo Man-su (skillfully portrayed by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun) loses his job after an American firm acquires his company. Man-su’s identity is deeply tied to his job, and, as his family cuts back on expenses, he is driven to take drastic measures. However, Park often seems indifferent to the complex cat-and-mouse pursuits of Westlake’s novel, and his scenes of violence have a blunter force—which is perhaps unsurprising, coming from the director of the vicious 2003 action-thriller Oldboy. For the most part, though, this is an extended character study; Man-su’s marriage gets far more attention, for example, than Burke’s does, and although the resulting scenes between the protagonist and his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) have startling passion at times, they draw attention from the multiple-murder plot. The details of the murders themselves also vary widely from the original work; one of the book’s most memorable set pieces, involving a vehicular hit-and-run, is entirely absent.

Still, the contemplative tone and fine character work in No Other Choice are compelling in their own right. The film also features some truly arresting images—thanks, in part, to cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, who also shot Park’s wonderful AMC miniseries adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. One scene, in which Man-su contemplates killing someone with a heavy potted plant, is stunning in its immediacy; one can feel each water droplet as it drips down onto the protagonist’s head. Ultimately, the film is less a straight adaptation of Westlake’s work than it is a companion piece—one that complements the stark anxiety of the original while delivering its own kinds of thrills.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.