No Other Choice: Park Chan-wook’s murderous thriller is goofy, grisly and perverse
The Korean director’s follow up to the carefully plotted Decision to Leave takes a more chaotic path with the story of an unemployed family man who tries to game the ailing job market by offing his competitors.
- Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival
Park Chan-wook’s latest obsessional thriller takes its title from the line given to workers by the new owners of a paper factory for their mass layoffs: there was, you see, no alternative. Soon enough in No Other Choice, freshly fired Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) lurches into stalking and offing his competitors for the next available job opening. Park’s comedic yet grisly version of the perennially familiar unemployment spiral adapts the 1997 novel The Ax by American crime writer Donald Westlake for another generation’s rounds of merciless downsizing.
Before the badness, No Other Choice flourishes Man-su’s picture-perfect life in the country, with a wife and two children he adores, two golden retrievers (with matching names), a lavish greenhouse, and blue skies and barbecues as far as the eye can see. Post-termination, Man-su gets a pitiful counselling session and takes a numbing warehouse job; he flubs a fresh job interview that a friend secures. So his practical wife Mi-ri (Son ye-jin) takes a job as a dentist’s assistant and slashes the household budget – including the house, which is Man-su’s remodelled childhood home. It’s put up for sale, and even the dogs are shipped off with the grandparents.
So far, so reasonable, and even in this run-up, we’re reminded of Park’s alacrity in setting a movie into motion (quite literally, as he likes to cuts into a scene with the camera or action already moving). But Man-su refuses to take “no other choice” for an answer, and the story hinges on his cocktail of deranging distress and pathological problem-solving. What makes No Other Choice tilt into black comedy is that all his deadly planning constantly teeters at the edge of disaster. What makes the outwardly normal Man-su a lost human being is that he dreads exposure and failure more than all the actual, you know, murdering.
Reeling in his victims by creating a bogus company and taking applications, Man-su bumbles through stakeouts and overtures. Two targets involve perverse set-pieces, typical of Park’s wide-ranging, eye-catchingly colourful flair for crime guignol. The demise of a rumpled paper-industry lifer (Lee Sung Min) who has a theatre actress wife (a madcap Yeom Hye Ran) ensnares Man-su in a grappling struggle in a living room while gratingly loud music deafens all of them. A more gruesome scheme involves staging the besotted victim’s death-by-choked-vomit.
The levelheaded influence in the film is Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin, bringing a welcome dose of understated humour). She puts up with her husband’s jealousy over her dentist boss, and goes all out to protect their son from an arrogant neighbour who’s threatening charges over his cell-phone thievery (which in turns suggests the boy’s absorbing his father’s moral vacuum by osmosis). Meanwhile, their younger, cellist daughter becomes an enigmatic symbol, refusing to play in the family’s earshot.
No Other Choice already looks to match the acclaim of Decision to Leave, with the bonus of a readily applicable story about homo economicus running amok. But that film entwined with its seductive plotting, whereas this one skitters along with an antic energy that, while goofily entertaining within scenes, doesn’t hit quite the same groove. Man-su’s loopy eagerness works against being truly drawn into his state of mind (not to mention his initial leap into killing), and whatever the downsides of his victims, it still feels a little awkward to laugh off their murders.
No doubt that’s part of the film’s thorny tragicomic premise, namely that Man-su is offing people who might have landed in similar dire straits, had the cards fallen a different way. The higher-ups directly responsible are a glancing presence personality-wise in contrast to the human foibles sketched out for Man-su’s condemned targets, such as Go Sijo (Cha Seung Won), now a milquetoast shoe salesman who waxes poetic about the good old paper days. Suitably enough Park decorates the film’s paper-world premise with analogue touches, including a soundtrack redolent of vinyl with its bit of bumping American soul and Korean ballads. A wartime gun from Man-su’s veteran father plays a key role in both crime and cover-up (even suggesting secondhand valour).
In the end, the film’s most persuasive point is that Man-su has simply mimicked the ruthless system that had disposed of him. His compulsive writing of notes-to-self on his palm underlines his directionless outside of context, and as he starts using the title phrase himself, it’s less a cynical reference than a profound capitulation of self.