Eojjeolsuga eobsda
Park Chan-wook (2025)
Yoo Man-su, long-standing employee of a South Korean paper manufacturer, loses his middle-management job after an American outfit takes over the firm. The loss of earnings jeopardises his comfortable home life with his wife, daughter, stepson, and their two golden retrievers, but he vows to get back into the paper-making industry within three months. Thirteen months later[1], he’s in relatively very lowly employment. He can’t keep up the mortgage payments on the family’s house or afford the expensive cello lessons recommended for his little daughter, Ri-one. Even the dogs have had to be rehomed with his in-laws. Man-su’s wife, Lee Mi-ri, gets a part-time job at a dental practice to help keep their heads above water but Man-su’s latest attempt to return to a management role ends in humiliation. He feels like killing Choi Seon-chul, the executive responsible for that humiliation; on the point of doing so, Man-su thinks again, reckoning murder will be worthwhile only if he can take over the dead man’s job. So he fakes an advertisement for a high-powered position and receives applications to identify his best-qualified competitors in the field. There are three, including the man he nearly murdered. Man-su embarks on a mission to kill each one in turn, using the gun his father once used in the Vietnam War.
No Other Choice is very different from the other Park Chan-wook films I’ve seen – Stoker (2013), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022) – and inferior to all three. Even in the opening sequence, as Man-su presides over a family barbecue and tells himself, ‘I’ve got it all’, the tone verges on mocking. The film soon turns into black comedy and stays that way. Park has directed comedy before: if this new work is typical of his comic style, I’m relieved not to have seen the movies in question (Trio (1997), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)). To assert its comedy credentials, No Other Choice includes a good deal of people tripping and slipping, banging their heads, farting loudly, and so on. Although the plot becomes convoluted, the style is consistent enough, but the result is laborious right to the end, which takes an unbelievably long time coming. At 139 minutes, the film is just the same length as Decision to Leave and only a few minutes shorter than The Handmaiden, both infinitely richer pieces.
The action is often extravagantly violent as Man-su dispatches his rivals and buries their bodies, in both cases clumsily. It’s no surprise that the film has attracted mostly excellent reviews from critics (at the time of writing, it’s 97% fresh from 215 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes). Park’s reputation ensures that more than a few members of the press will genuflect automatically. More remarkable is No Other Choice’s commercial success – in South Korea and North America, where its takings have already tripled its production budget. Maybe it’s the garish, plentiful mayhem and bloodshed, along with regular dollops of broad comedy, that have helped Park to the biggest box-office hit of his career.
Despite praise for the film as a ‘sensational state-of-the-nation satire’ (Guardian), Park’s target in No Other Choice seems less the capitalist rat race as such than the outlook of Man-su and those on his hit list. The paper-making industry is, of course, a line of work that guarantees an ecological subtext throughout. But Park’s words about his protagonist in an online interview[2] are instructive too:
‘Man-su has lived a foolish life where he believes that making money at his job equates to his entire existence, and that to make money equates to being a father and a husband. So, to him, losing his job means he’s become worthless as a man. He’s a very pitiful person who is stuck in a small box where he believes that a husband or father has to act a certain way.’
The idea that a man is defined by his work has a long and not ignoble cinema history, though the man (it usually has been a man) needs to have the right kind of job. No Other Choice is a clear case in point. Few of its admirers would enjoy a film about a dedicated teacher who lost their job, let alone blue-collar workers on a factory production line, even in a paper mill. Man-su is fired from Solar Papers after voicing opposition to the new owners’ downsizing plans that will make junior colleagues redundant, but Park gives him no credit for that. As his words above suggest, he’s highly unsympathetic to his anti-hero’s plight, never mind that Man-su does need to ‘make money’ to support his family. When he describes Man-su as ‘pitiful’, Park means inadequate rather than deserving of pity. An internationally successful film artist is showing his contempt for a confirmed, seemingly conscientious white-collar worker. It doesn’t make for edifying viewing.
No Other Choice is dedicated to Costa-Gavras (now in his nineties), best known for Z but who also directed the French-made Le couperet (2005). This was the first screen adaptation of Park’s source material – Donald E Westlake’s 1997 horror-thriller novel The Ax. Westlake’s title, hinting at what the paper industry does to both the trees it needs and the workers it doesn’t need, is neater but Park is at pains to justify his. (He shares the screenplay credit with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Lee Ja-hye.) Solar Paper’s new management, without justifying the laying off of staff, insist they have ‘no other choice’. Man-su’s first victim is Goo Beom-mo (although it’s actually Goo’s drama-queen wife A-ra who, in a three-way stuggle with her husband and Man-su, fires the fatal shot). Another veteran of the paper industry and a hopeless alcoholic since he lost his job, Goo laments that he has ‘no other choice’ but paper when it comes to how he makes a living. Unless I missed it, the second victim, amiable Ko Si-jo, a sales assistant in a shoe store since he lost his paper-work, doesn’t say ‘no other choice’, but Man-su mutters the phrase to himself repeatedly. In his case, its meaning is a bit more ambiguous. Man-su could simply be echoing Goo’s sentiments. He could also be referring to the homicidal journey on which he’s embarked.
Almost throughout the film, Man-su has bad toothache. He refuses treatment offered by his wife’s boss, Oh Jin-ho, partly because Man-su suspects the dentist of having designs on Mi-ri but chiefly because the toothache is symbolic. It represents Man-su’s guilty conscience about what he’s doing or, to put it more positively, nagging vestiges of humanity. This is the closest that Park comes to sympathy with Man-su. Abstinent for most of the story, he’s obliged to drink with Seon-chul, to get him drunk and ripe for killing. Alcohol helps Man-su withstand the pain of yanking out his decayed tooth with pliers, before dispatching his third and last victim. Once Man-su’s troublesome tooth is out, the film’s normal sardonic service is fully resumed
No Other Choice‘s best bits are the scenes between Man-su and Mi-ri – though they’re also frustrating since they give a flavour of what Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin, who play the pair, might be capable of in a suppler Park film. As Man-su, Lee is committed and necessarily energetic throughout but the husband-and-wife exchanges allow him to be more nuanced. A highlight is a fancy dress party and its aftermath, where dental envy and marital tension collide, and the result is funny and sad. Delayed on nefarious business, Man-su arrives late to the party to see his wife and Oh, both dressed as Native Americans, dancing together. He feels a fool in his military uniform, gold braid and bicorne hat. Back home with Mi-ri, he demands an explanation – ‘What were you thinking? Matching your costume with Dr Ouch – dressing me up as a goddamn Nutcracker?’ His exasperated wife enlightens Man-su – he was meant to be John Smith, and she was Pocahontas: ‘Ri-one’s favorite cartoon! You forgot? We watched it a million times with her! When I told Dr Oh I’d be Pocahontas, the whole clinic decided to be Native Americans! … You and I were meant to be a pair!’
And that’s what they are, even when Mi-ri finds out what Man-su has been up to. Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin convey so well what attracted the couple (and still attracts them) to each other that their relationship is more interesting than anything else in No Other Choice – whether the botched serial killings, the neurodivergent cello prodigy Ri-one, or a subplot involving Si-one, Mi-ri’s son from her first marriage, who, with a schoolfriend, steals iPhones from a store owned by the friend’s father. The latter is also the offensively arrogant would-be buyer of Man-su and Mi-ri’s property when they’re struggling to keep it. You can’t help but be pleased when they get the better of him.
Man-su is appointed by Moon Paper to the post vacated by Seon-chul. His family can afford to keep their house and Ri-one’s cello lessons. The little girl’s anti-social behaviour is also improved by the return of the golden retrievers, though they’ll need to stop scrabbling around the apple tree under which the bodies of Si-jo and Cheon-sul are buried. Man-su has less to fear from the dumb police detective duo who decide that Goo Beom-mo may have murdered Si-jo before being killed by A-ra in self-defence. At Moon Paper, Man-su finds himself the company’s sole human employee, supervising the machines that have taken over all other jobs. Straight-faced closing images show a forest of trees being felled. I guess that will enable some viewers to come out of No Other Choice satisfied they’ve been watching a politically serious and responsible parable for our times.
4 February 2026
[1] A time interval that must have some special significance for Park Chan-wook: the two main parts of the narrative in Decision to Leave are also separated by thirteen months.
[2] https://letterboxd.com/journal/park-chan-wook-no-other-choice-interview/
