No Other Choice (2025)
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
Premise: An unemployed papermill supervisor (Lee Byung-hun) identifies three rival candidates for a job opening. He schemes to kill his competitors.
What Works: Many of Park Chan-wook’s films are black comedies or at least have a strong sardonic quality. No Other Choice is partially in that company. It is very violent in places but the violence has an absurdity and an element of physical comedy. The story is about a man driven to murder by economic desperation. Lee Byung-hun plays Yoo, a former papermill supervisor who has been out of gainful employment for over a year. The phrase “no other choice” is a consistent refrain throughout the movie. Many of the characters are trapped by their professional identity. Yoo and the other former papermill employees cannot conceive of themselves as anything else. Yoo’s family is accustomed to a certain kind of life and they struggle to adapt. The various characters’ insistence that there is “no other choice” enables them to do terrible things or to do nothing at all. This idea takes an interesting turn in the end as the filmmakers work automation into the movie. Industrialists speak of the move toward automation and the elimination of human labor as a natural and unavoidable development rather than a conscious choice. This story plays as a depiction of dehumanization as Yoo murders his competitors and workers are displaced by machines but No Other Choice is also about a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to act with agency. There is some great imagery in No Other Choice and the editing is exceptional especially in the way images and movements are interwoven.
What Doesn’t: No Other Choice simultaneously retains and downplays some of the distinguishing qualities of Park Chan-wook’s movies. Oldboy and Stoker are about dastardly characters doing bad things and getting away with it. While that’s true of No Other Choice, the film doesn’t have the gleeful cynicism that made those movies so fun to watch. Park’s more recent movies such as The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave have an aching humanity as the characters agonize over their choices. The characters of No Other Choice don’t much question their motives nor does the film dwell on the characters’ choices. There’s not much sense of escalation. Yoo’s violent choices don’t change him. The marital conflict and the police investigation go nowhere. The tone of No Other Choice comes across indecisive, as though the filmmakers aren’t sure if this is funny or not.
Bottom Line: No Other Choice is more dramatically and stylistically muted than Park Chan-wook’s other pictures but it is a smart dramatization of the way free will and choice are sifted through our own imagination and sense of self.
Episode: #1083 (January 18, 2026)