No Other Choice (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Park Chan-wook's latest crime story from Korea, No Other Choice is more deliberately a stress-out comedy than his darker thrillers, but this one is plenty dark and definitely keeps you off-balance with its cleverness.

Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has it all. He is happily married to the beautiful Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), and they have two beautiful children, Man-su's stepson Si-one and their daughter Ri-One, a neurodivergent cello prodigy, as well as two dogs. They all live in Man-su's beloved childhood home, which is now decorated with beautiful things.

Man-su is proud of his job at Solar Paper, where he has worked for 25 years and won the "Pulp Man of the Year" award. Unfortunately, Americans buy the company, and Man-su finds himself unemployed. He vows to find work within three months, but a year later, he is still looking, and the family finances are becoming strained.

After failing to land a job at Moon Paper and being humiliated by manager Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) decides to kill him and get his job. But he realizes that his plan won't work unless he eliminates his fiercest competition first.

Director Park is probably best known for his brutal, brilliant Oldboy, as well as for murder-thrillers like Stoker and Decision to Leave, and there are sometimes moments of absurdity in his movies, but No Other Choice — adapted from a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel — is arguably his most outright comedy since his odd, and oddly-titled, I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006).

Park's inventive, suggestive set design and camera placements set the tone, but it's the incredible actor Lee Byung-hun who sells the dark humor. He handles physicality skillfully, such as when he attempts to spy on one of his potential victims and slips and slides around on a hillside covered with dead leaves, or the pivotal moment when he considers dropping a potted plant on a man. (He picks up a pot, holds it for a moment, sets it down, and then selects a larger one.)

Yet Lee's real skill is that he allows us to see his brain humming as he thinks his way through each situation. His first attempts at murder are clumsy and amateurish, but he quickly, frighteningly, develops a knack for it.

To be sure, No Other Choice makes you squirm before it makes you laugh. The painfully true situation involving corporate greed and lack of concern for the welfare of the unemployed, but also the desperate measures adopted by the protagonist, make this a brilliantly twisted experience.