Park Chan-wook | 2hr 19min
When paper manufacturing manager Yoo Man-su is fired from Solar Paper, the American buyers inform him that they unfortunately had “no other choice.” When rival job candidate Goo Beom-mo attempts to justify his borderline romantic obsession with paper, he explains it’s just who he is – “I’ve no other choice” – and likewise, losing his previous job wasn’t his choice either. Still, it’s a brutal labour market out there, especially in an industry sliding steadily into automation. When Man-su thus decides that the only way to secure a position with competitor Moon Paper is by eliminating the other candidates, his reasoning is simple. He has no other choice than to leave the hiring panel with no other choice.
Still, this excuse can only stretch so far. Park Chan-wook has wielded irony with incredible deftness throughout his career, forcing characters to meet the tragic consequences of their own transgressions, but never with such a darkly comedic edge. The bureaucratic nihilism which spreads through No Other Choice doesn’t just breed a complacent sense of powerlessness. For Man-su in particular, that abdication of accountability becomes a refuge – far preferable to confronting his own moral cowardice.
What results is a densely plotted yet surprisingly tight psychological thriller, hinging its tension on one family man’s attempts to salvage some dignity as a working professional. The three-month deadline that Man-su sets to re-enter the skilled workforce quietly slips into thirteen, with nothing but a dead-end job stacking shelves to pay the bills while his wife Mi-ri takes a part-time position as a dental assistant. The idyllic garden paradise of the opening scene’s family lunch has been flushed away, though of course Park foreshadowed this collapse from the start with a poetically cruel match cut, dissolving their warm hug into a close-up of water spiralling down a factory drain. When they receive a house foreclosure notice in the mail, the existential panic begins to set in too, spurred on by Mi-ri’s list of financial sacrifices they must make – chief among them, the cancellation of Netflix.
With his botched interview at Moon Paper deepening his humiliation, something seems to shift inside Man-su, and Lee Byung-hun’s performance also subtly pivots. Having most famously played the Front Man in Squid Game, he brings a similarly chilling restraint here, while simultaneously undercutting that with a nervous, desperate energy which amusingly sabotages his own schemes. Holding a pot plant high on a balcony and preparing to a drop it on his first target below, Man-su hesitates – and a slow trickle of water escapes the base, dribbling onto his own head. Whenever he holds the upper hand, Park can’t resist humiliating his protagonist, and his command of visual comedy proves crucial in this hilarious self-sabotage.
Despite Man-su’s attempts to thoroughly plot each murder, his successes consequently seem to hinge more on pure luck. Park lays the dramatic irony on thick here, foregrounding oblivious characters while dark punchlines unfold in the background, and even using this technique to visually layer shots involving phone screens. Where so many directors either avoid depicting modern communications technology or render it entirely uncinematic, Park embraces the challenge, having previously reinvented the aesthetic of texting in Decision to Leave and now transforming video calls into a suspenseful framing device. His creativity is seemingly boundless, crafting point-of-view shots that rigorously lock onto the phone, and cleverly hiding the chaos behind it from Man-su’s unsuspecting wife.
On a broader level too, Park weaves his stylish subjectivity throughout No Other Choice with dextrous flair, tying his expressive camera choreography and dramatic angles to Man-su’s psychological state. The smooth crane shots of his stable, peaceful life give way to brisk movements as its foundations gradually crack, and later when he is pressured to indulge in alcohol, Park fixes our perspective to the bottom of the glass. Like a nagging conscience made flesh, Man-su’s toothache always seems to flare up at his guiltiest moments, and never one to miss a chance for visual metaphor, Park unflinchingly angles the camera inside his mouth each time to study him painfully wiggling it in close-up.
One would also be remiss to disregard the remarkable fluidity of No Other Choice’s editing rhythms, orchestrating narrative flow through creative scene transitions, graphic match cuts, and flashbacks, though it is the elegantly disorienting use of double exposure effects which most vividly manifests Man-su’s unsettled subconscious. These blended shots surface his deepest disturbances as he digs a grave, superimposing the image of Mi-ri rolling in bed as if stirred by his shovel, while elsewhere a fake job ad he places in a magazine playfully frames him speaking directly to camera.
Park’s dramatic irony finds its place in this contrast of distinct visual cues too, interrupting Man-su’s desperate schemes with his family’s oblivious pursuits, and eventually intercutting the digging and exhumation of two graves as that ignorance begins to fray. At times, Park’s parallel editing deliberately withholds the immediate connections between scenes, yet assuredly builds to a punchline as it shifts between Man-su and his son making getaways from their respective crimes. When the police consequently turn up to their house the following morning, Man-su is ready to confess to murder – so he can’t quite believe his luck when Si-one is arrested for burglary instead.
Indeed, happenstance seems to be this killer’s greatest ally, especially since there’s little that truly separates his circumstances from those of his victims. Beom-mo in particular acts as a foil to Man-su, not only as an unemployed paper specialist slowly losing his sanity, but also through the uncanny parallel between his wife’s affair and Mi-ri’s suspected infidelity. The chaotic confusion between the two men hilariously erupts into a farcical comedy of errors, though make no mistake – Man-su’s success in overcoming his target hinges far more on coincidence than calculation. By eliminating his mirror image, Man-su effectively erases the reflection of his own failures, and Park sharply exposes the erosion of solidarity among working professionals.
After all, perhaps the most prized commodity in this capitalist world is the social identity derived from one’s job, and from which prosperity, dignity, and respect are conferred. For Man-su, there is no use in aiming these attacks upwards, even if the executives are the one manufacturing this illusion of merit-based value. Instead, competition is bred between workers who find themselves in a shrinking middle class, and their colleagues replaced by robots and machines. Whoever cuts off their conscience most efficiently may win this cutthroat competition, yet Park offers no moral victory in survival. “No other choice,” Man-su repeats to himself like a mantra, as if to convince himself of his passiveness – but as Park’s meticulous narrative construction so hauntingly ponders, what remains of a man complicit in a violently indifferent, self-erasing system?
No Other Choice will be coming to Australian cinemas on 14 January, 2026.
