No Other Choice ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Availability: Showing widely in theaters; to be released on Netflix/Korea January 29 but no estimates of a date for streaming beyond access to a South Korean service. See JustWatch here for future purchase and rental availability.
Getting the Ax
A sympathetic paper company manager is at the heart of this black comedy of unemployment in the post-industrial age. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) seems content in his ordinary family life: an attractive wife cheerfully playing tennis and dancing in new shoes, a teen-age stepson he treats “as my own,” a neurodivergent elementary school daughter who is a cello prodigy, all living in a house full of warmth and consumer goods, complete with a large greenhouse where Man-su bends bonsai creations (a foreshadowing metaphor) to his will.
Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) contemplates killing a competitor for a job
by dropping the potted plant on his head.
The protagonist is a man without worries, until he isn’t. Let go from his job at a company undergoing technological transformation, he attends job-training/therapy programs, one of many men standing in a circle, tapping their temples and reciting mantras: “It’s not my fault”….”I will be employed in 3 months.”
Until he is let go from his job, Man-su (Lee) relishes his idyllic life with his wife, son,
and daughter in their upper-middle-class home surrounded by greenery.
It’s been more than a year with no job prospects when Man-su’s take-charge wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) announces they have to sell the house and can’t give their daughter the cello lessons she needs, among other cutbacks to the family’s lifestyle. Man-su is driven to explore another option, namely eliminating the competition for the remaining job left in the industry.
Director Park Chan-wook turns a lively story of appealing men and women into a tale of personal betrayal of moral norms, capped by murder.
In this second cinematic re-telling of “The Ax,” a novel by Donald E. Westlake (screenwriter for “The Grifters,” 1990), director Park Chan-wook turns a lively story of appealing men and women into a tale of personal betrayal of moral norms, capped by murder.
Man-su is charming and earnest as the happy family man and then the farcical unemployed lost soul who contemplates dropping a large flowerpot on a competitor’s head. He can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he buys the pot.
The second target of the former “Pulp Man of the Year” is another unemployed paper man, Bummo (Lee Sung-min), who is sitting at home drowning his jobless sorrows in drink. He too has an aggressive wife. Ara (Yeom Hye-ran) is a former actress hell-bent on getting her husband out of his recliner to open a music café with his extensive vinyl collection. Man-su doesn’t kill Bummo either, though his actions lead to the elimination of this perceived threat. The comic element takes center stage here as, at one point, all 3—Man-su, Bummo, and his wife—are desperately vying with each other for the lone handgun.
Successive attempts at killing off the competition get progressively less amusing and more shocking. Comparisons to the Korean hit film “Parasite” (2019) are only somewhat apt. In “Parasite”—the first foreign film to win a Best Picture Oscar—the underclass murderously attacks the wealthy elite. In “No Other Choice,” it’s Man-su’s fellow middle-aged, middle-class laid-off managers who are the victims, making the film both more horrific and perhaps ethically suspect.
Man-su's (Lee, left) killings are not without moral cost. He engages his potential victims—here, Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon) in mutual despair over their jobless plight
before events take a darker turn.
Co-writer and director Park, whose previous film, “Decision to Leave” (2022), also dealt with moral ambiguity and choice, challenges the audience with both class-on-class murder and with the abhorrent turn the killings take.
The script is interspersed throughout with delightful vignettes of domestic life and work-related activity.
The script is interspersed throughout with delightful vignettes of domestic life and work-related activity, scenes that induce both laughter and sentiment, bathed in a Korean milieu but one that translates to any culture. (Brooklyn-born Westlake’s book was set in the United States; the 2005 film version was French, by Costa-Gavras.) The married couples engage in sexual inuendo and play; they cavort, dance, sniff panties, and jump on each other, as well as pester and nag. Park cannily leads us to appreciate and identify with the people who are willing to kill, do kill, and are killed.
“Pulp Man of the Year” may seem like a joke (the trophy becomes a weapon in one scene), but to Man-su, and the men like him, it’s a genuine honor.
Park (“Oldboy” 2003) is a gifted director, his work always worthy of serious consideration. For those attuned to the devastating effects of unemployment, “No Other Choice” may be a strain of delectable revenge—except those at fault, represented by American buyers of the paper plant, aren’t the targets. He’s also a director who can saturate a film with intriguing characters, episodes, backstories, side plots, and moral ambiguity. Did he go too far here? The audiences to date—mainly at film festivals—have found resonance in the story. In our current zeitgeist, might murder have become, if not the only choice, at least a satisfying one?
She says: Even though I liked the film, I had to hide my eyes at times—the horror got to me, but then it did in “Parasite” too.
He says: One of the murders committed by Man-su, of a laid-off manager turned shoe salesman, is so gratuitously disgusting that it overpowers Park’s message. The answer to “did he go too far?” is yes.
Date: 2025
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Park Hee-soon
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean, with English subtitles
Runtime: 139 minutes
Other Awards: 19 wins, including the International People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and 89 other nominations
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