You May Have Missed: No Other Choice (Dir Park Chan-wook, 2h19m, 2025)
Three years ago, I came across, as part of 2023's You May Have Missed season, Decision to Leave, a taut detective/neo noir in which a detective becomes romantically entangled with his chief suspect; released in 2022, it was my introduction to veteran South Korean filmmaker, Park
Chan-wook. As I remarked at the time, taking nearly 300 reviews to arrive at Park's work perhaps indicated some work was needed on my part to consider directors out of the Anglo-centric sphere more (more on such later
in 2026). Fortunately, it's not taken me another 300 reviews to return back to Park's filmography, as 2025 saw the release of his newest feature, now out in cinemas. No Other Choice, a darkly satirical and undeniably thrilling look at Korean society sees an out of work executive (played by Lee
Byung-hun) turn to brutal measures to win back his job for the sake of his family.
Park Chan-Wook, and Korean cinema itself, has been busy since we last discussed them: Park has directed two miniseries
for American television, adapting both Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl (starring Michael Shannon and Florence Pugh), and The Sympathizer, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, (itself starring Hoa Xuande against Robert Downey Jr in a kaleidoscopic series of roles), whilst Bong
Joon Ho's Mickey 17 was charming despite its underperformance at the US box office. More alarming, and perhaps implicitly indicated by its two most internationally famous
directors both making English-Language projects, is the nigh collapse in Korea's cinema-going, almost halving since 2019, with the number of domestically made films also plummeting
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| Head Hunting: Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) turns to desperate measures to get a job |
All of this comes in a year where Korean pop culture, via Netflix's double-threat of popular game-show thriller Squid Games, and runaway animation success K-Pop Demon Hunter (both incidently starring Lee Byung-hun), has never been more prominent or popular. No Other Choice is, certainly, a very different beast to Decision to Leave; its touch is lighter, based on the French 2005 The Axe, (directed by Costas-Gravas, itself based on the novel The Ax by Donald Westlake), its premise simple. With Yoo Man-su (Lee) finding himself
suddenly unemployed after the paper company he has worked for for decades downsizes - the film itself begins with Man-Su and his family in idyllic surroundings that border on the saccharine - so, faced with the breakdown of
his family, and loss of the home he has built, Man-Su, often hapless throughout, turns to desperate measures.
Desperately attempting to even get an interview, he is subjected to a humiliating scuffle in an
office toilet, Park's DoP Kim Woo-hyung, responsible for many beautiful images throughout this film, getting in close to the fighting figures, the door that Man-Su's tormentor attempts to slam on him, and the physicality
of the scene. Shamed, and with his family tightening their finances, except for their daughter Ri-one's cello lessons, her sole solace as she struggles with everyday life, so Man-Su begins to plot. From his wretched attempts
to kill a fellow applicant via dropped plant-pot, giving the film its defining shot of Man-Su, water dripping onto his head, pot aloft, that heavily features in the film's marketing, desperation personified, Man-Su changes
tack, and here the film changes tack to its blackly comic centre, a thriller in which Man-Su's faux headhunting becomes very literal, selecting his shortlist of those likely to compete with him for job roles with the sole
successful paper-producer in South Korea, Moon Paper, and seeking them out.
This trio themselves are excellent foils for Man-Su, from the audiophile Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), whose twisted love triangle with
his wife and their lover, and obsession with paper leads to one of the darkest and funniest sequence in the film, to the lonely figure of Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), reduced to working in a high-end shoe-shop to look after
his daughter, to Seon-chul, (Park Hee-soon)'s macho but ultimately shallow influencer. It's easy to consider some degree of social commentary to this, the increasing mechanisation of labour, the increasingly vacuous
or unambitious men, beholden to gadgetry or image-there's a stinger right at the end of the film that casts this mad dash into sharp relief-whilst there's some biting depictions of Korea's obsequience to class
and technology. Certainly as we considered with Decision to Leave, a glance at Korea's society is never far from the surface.
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| In No Other Choice, Park Chan-Wook has made another beautifully shot, often darkly funny thriller |
Here, the touch is lighter, the entire film underpinned by this sense of gleeful, if bloody, fun, the dark thrill of hunting down and killing those in Man-Su's way, and the chaotic sense of this plan going
off the rails. The film does not pull its punches in its depictions of violence, including a gruelling but darkly funny fight in a bedroom, over which deafening music plays, and a wince-inducing sequence in which a tooth is
removed which may rival any scene from 2025 in terms of pure unpleasantness. As law enforcement warn Man-Su that other paper-men are being murdered, the increasing suspicion and eventual collusion of Man-Su's wife Mi-ri
(Son Ye-jin), who acts as distant wife, concerned bystander and eventual collaborator, and even Man-Su's son, Si-one, getting involved in petty theft, all of this adds to a febrile and often blackly comic atmosphere
in which the hunt for work turns lethal.
All of this would make No Other Choice a memorable film, but in Park Chan-Wook and Kim Woo-hyung's hands, the script
and the cinematography - of which I was greatly enamoured in Decision to Leave - this becomes another beautifully made, visually arresting, and extremely funny piece of cinema, from Park's usage of overlaid imagery to create dreamlike imagery to a remarkably clever shot in which, via ADR and smart shot composition, two people stand back to back, a united front, as they talk over the telephone, many miles apart. Park has long since become a master
of playing with shots, with the language of cinema, and he is clearly having fun here; combined with the taut script and its occasionally shocking violence as Man-Su seeks to climb the corporate ladder, it makes No Other Choice riveting viewing.
Above all, films like No Other Choice remind me why I keep returning to directors I have found whilst writing
for this blog, why I keep returning to voices outside the Hollywood system, why I love talking and writing about cinema. No Other Choice is another instant classic from Park Chan-Wook, a director I admire, a smartly made thriller in which a man must turn to violent acts to protect his family and find a job, and
where one of Korea's great film-makers is in fine form to tell this bleakly funny tale of murderous ambition.
Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)
Next week, to February, and the season of love, with Gothic Romance!
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