No Other Choice
Korean - Comedy, Drama
146 mins
Rent on Prime Video
Prologue
Both Park Chan-wook (PCW — Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave) and Bong Joon-ho (BJH — Memories of Murder, Mother, Parasite) are filmmakers who helped transform South Korean cinema into a global force.
BCH often blends social commentary, class conflict, and satire within highly accessible genre films, while PCW is more operatic, psychological, and visually stylized, with themes of obsession, guilt, and vengeance. Yet both filmmakers share an extraordinary ability to balance tonal shifts, visual precision, and deeply Korean storytelling with universal emotional appeal.
The Review
These are trying times. As industries begin to absorb the true scale of robotics, automation, and AI, No Other Choice becomes a satirical take on the devastating consequences of job loss.
The movie opens with an idyllic summer day at the home of Man Su (Lee Byung-hun), who feels that he has everything in life while enjoying a summer barbecue with his wife, teenage son, young daughter, and two beautiful dogs — his “everything in life.”
The very next day, Man Su, a veteran paper mill employee, is laid off after 25 years when his American corporate owners begin downsizing the firm. The shock is tremendous. His family is forced to make changes, give up their dogs, move into a smaller home, his daughter has to abandon her cello lessons, and his wife, Mi Ri, takes up a job as an assistant dentist.
Months turn into years and soon Man Su becomes a depressed soul. He attends therapy, goes door to door searching for a job, but to no avail. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Man Su decides that his best chance of survival is to eliminate his competition!!
Man Su puts up a fake hiring advertisement soliciting applications, to which many of his peers from the paper-making industry respond. He identifies the top three applicants and begins plotting how to take them out.
What follows is an absurd, comical, thrilling, and tragic exploration of how badly Man Su wants his “everything in life” back. The story, originally based on the 1997 novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, beautifully juxtaposes the lives of his three competitors as well. We discover that they are not very different from Man Su himself.
This is PCW stepping into BJH territory of social satire. There are many absurdly funny sequences when Man Su scouts his first target - a bumbling old man whose wife is cheating on him. There is also a poignant undertone when he discovers that his second target is also a devoted father like himself. PCW does not completely abandon his love for violence either. While not as gory as Oldboy, there are still a couple of visually disturbing sequences that follow.
Lee Byung-hun ( I Saw the Devil and Squid Game) is superb as Man Su. As a proud man shaken by circumstance and reacting desperately to survive, he is a scene stealer. Son Ye-jin plays the perfect foil as the supportive and understanding wife.
The film stretches itself a bit too much in the final third and could easily have been 10–15 minutes tighter while delivering the same impact.
Epilogue
While not operating at the same level as Parasite, No Other Choice remains a sharp and unsettling exploration of how quickly dignity collapses when survival itself becomes competitive.
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