“No Other Choice” – Park Chan-wook’s Symphony of Middle-Class Malice
For over two decades, Park Chan-wook has been the architect of some of South Korea’s most stylishly visceral cinematic moments. From the hammer-swinging violence of “Oldboy” (2003) and the “Violence Trilogy” to the lush, intimate trickery of “The Handmaiden” (2016), Park has always excelled at pushing human desire to its absolute, often grotesque, limit. After a brief detour into the misty, melancholic romanticism of “Decision to Leave” (2022), Park returns to his “Grand Guignol” roots with “No Other Choice” (2025). This longtime passion project, adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel “The Ax,” reunites Park with Lee Byung-hun for a film that feels less like a typical thriller and more like a horror story of unemployment.
The Plot: The Pulp Man’s Descent
The film follows You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a “Pulp Man of the Year” veteran who has spent 25 years at Solar Paper. When an American buyout leads to mass layoffs, Man-su is unceremoniously “axed” and sent right out the back door with every memory of his career reduced to a single box. After 13 months of failing to find a comparable job, he realizes his upper-middle-class life, complete with a modernist dream home and his wife Mi-ri’s (Son Ye-jin) high-society hobbies, is on the verge of total collapse.
Desperate, Man-su identifies Moon Paper, a rival firm, as a high-potential choice. However, the position he seeks is currently filled by Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), an arrogant line manager and social media influencer who humiliates Man-su when he attempts to hand over a CV. He decides that if an opening does not exist, he will simply create one by killing Seon-chul.
But his corporate logic takes an even darker turn: he realizes that simply murdering the boss is not enough. If he creates the vacancy, Moon Paper will simply hire from a pool of other highly qualified candidates, many of whom have resumes that eclipse his own. To ensure he is the only choice, Man-su launches a fake job advertisement for a fictional company, “Red Pepper Paper,” to lure his rivals into the open, revealing their credentials so he can rank, identify, and eliminate them one by one before finally moving on to Seon-chul.
Equipped with his father’s Vietnam-era pistol—a relic of another violent system—Man-su embarks on a clumsy, amateurish murder spree. His targets, unlike the malicious Seon-chul, are men just like him: the alcoholic, broken Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) and the devoted father Si-jo (Cha Seung-won). The brilliance of the script lies in how it frames these killings as cold, logistical necessities, despite that being anything but the truth. The title itself makes this irony all the more explicit: Man-su could easily pursue “other choices” in his career, but his pride as a Paper Company veteran, in his status, and in his home, obfuscates those “choices.”
Beyond the “K-Class” Label: The Clone Fatigue
Since the global dominance of “Parasite” (2019) and “Squid Game” (2021), international audiences have developed a habit of labeling every South Korean film or show about money as interchangeable or just a “clone” of what came before. Critics have already begun dismissively labeling “No Other Choice” as a successor to the “playbook” of “Bong Joon-ho” (creator of “Parasite”).
However, “No Other Choice” proves itself to be a distinct creature through its theatricality and commitment to the absurd. Unlike the calculated precision of the Kim family in “Parasite,” Man-su is a spectacular amateur. His violence is not cool or stylized; it is awkward, flailing, and often pathetic. In one of the several murder scenes, he struggles to unwrap a gun from layers of kitchen mitts and plastic wrap before firing it, a moment of “Charlie Chaplin levels” of slapstick.
Awards & Accolades
The industry reception for “No Other Choice” has been nothing short of electric. Following its world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, the film received a staggering standing ovation, with critics instantly hailing it as one of Park’s most full-blooded works to date. It currently maintains a near-perfect score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Time Out calling it “a masterful work of cinema which might well be Chan-wook’s masterpiece,” and Loud and Clear praising it as a fascinating study of a man whose “goofiness… makes him endearing and even relatable.”
The film’s momentum only grew at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the International People’s Choice Award. This win is particularly significant as it proves the film’s “clumsy” humor translates across cultures. As Cinema Escapist noted, the film balances levity and darkness to “totally reveal how the world and human society works.”
Messaging: The Shadow of AI and the Empty Factory
While the film is a brutal satire of human ego, it is equally a warning about the erasure of the human worker. Park has integrated a modern update to the source material, setting Man-su’s desperate struggle against a backdrop of chillingly efficient technology. In the film’s climax, we see the factory that Man-su gets to oversee managed entirely by AI and robots, a place where humans are no longer necessary. This is followed by a haunting sequence of robots ruthlessly cutting down trees, a visual metaphor for a system that clears away anything living to make room for cold progress.
Park uses this high-tech backdrop to highlight the tragic futility of Man-su’s mission. While Man-su is busy murdering his peers to get into the factory, the factory is busy evolving to ensure he, and everyone like him, can never return. In an interview with Collider, Park explained that he viewed this development as the existential threat it is:
“When I was preparing for those scenes [of robots managing the factory and cutting down trees], I imagined it as this futuristic battle that you would see in films like ‘Terminator.’ So, through those scenes, I try to express my fear of AI.”
Park further critiques the common industry stance that AI is simply a “new tool,” calling that perspective dangerously naive. He rejects the metaphor of humans holding the reins of an “AI horse,” arguing instead that this technology is a fundamentally different beast.
“People sometimes say that we still have the reins of this horse, and that AI technology is just a horse, but I think those statements are too naive… The best-case scenario for our future is for the AI and humans to create together, not just for the humans to command the AI on how to create. That is a great fear of mine.”
The Cage with No Door
“No Other Choice” is a masterclass in tonal tightrope walking. It manages to be both a visceral portrait of self-preservation and a caustic indictment of our modern social structure, proving that Park Chan-wook has not mellowed with age; he has simply found sharper, more mundane things to be terrified of. By the time the credits roll, the film leaves you with the uncomfortable realization that the “rat race” is being run in a cage where the door has already been replaced by a wall.
“No Other Choice” is in select theaters now and is expected to be on streaming soon.