Deliciously morbid in its humour, but hauntingly satirical in its thematic resonance, No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다), playing at the BFI London Film Festival, rivets with its stellar visuals and sharp direction.
The surge of popularity in South Korean cinema and culture (labelled Hallyu) is in part due to a willingness to hybridise. By combining various genres and influences, including those that transcend transnational borders, modern South Korean films have developed their own idiosyncratic identities. Park Chan-wook’s newest film is based on an American novel. Yet, its tonal fusions, giddy direction, and scathing thematic resonance are in staunch keeping with both the director’s style and the inherent appeal of South Korean cinema. It’s dark and bizarre but uniquely engrossing.
Based on The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, No Other Choice begins with an American Dream fairy tale ending. You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a thriving manager of twenty-five years at a paper manufacturing company. He owns a huge house, works so his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), doesn’t have to, has two kids, two golden retrievers, and spends his free time gardening to his heart’s content. It’s as idyllic a life as someone of upper-middle-class status can ask for. This makes his sudden layoff by his longtime employer, which has recently been bought out by American investors, all the more tragic.
Months pass, and Man-su is still bouncing between dead-end jobs with seemingly no way back into the paper industry he has poured his life into. When the prospect of selling the house arises, twinned with a humiliating interview at a rival paper company, Man-su decides to take drastic action. Through methods as clever as they are dubious, Man-su tracks down other candidates who are gunning for his preferred positions. His twisted logic is simple: if there’s no other competition, then he will get the job. Thus, a deadly game of elimination begins.
It’s a brilliant premise that makes for a bleak horror thriller story in Westlake’s 1997 novel. When adapted to fit director Park’s style, however, the premise becomes deeply satirical. Many of the best South Korean films, including all of Bong Joon-ho’s work, have explored sociopolitical themes about class consciousness, authoritarianism, and discontent with modern capitalism. No Other Choice fits into that conglomerate like a glove as it lifts the veil off the corporate rat race to get a job in an imbalanced society, revealing what we’re conditioned to see as normal to be, at best, a farce and at worst a selling out of one’s morals in vain.
Whether it’s Joint Security Area, Oldboy or that one hanging scene in The Handmaiden, director Park has laced even his darkest premises with a spoonful of morbid humour. No Other Choice consumes the whole cake, its harrowing plot of murder and hapless desperation thick with the icing of black comedy.
Scholars of South Korean culture and history have a term called social pujoris, referring to the irregularities in everyday life that are influenced by political corruption or social injustice. The film’s comedic tone fits squarely into this term: Man-su’s actions are ridiculous and comical, with his initial reservations about killing someone portrayed as clownish. Yet the immoral absurdity is born from the social injustice of a hard worker being laid off so the CEOs could make bigger profits faster. One especially strange scene, in which Man-su, one of his targets, and the target’s wife wrestle on the floor for a gun, is reminiscent of Parasite in how the working classes are pitted against each other despite their shared struggles.
Byung-hun, who was so intimidating as the Front Man in Squid Game, gets to proudly show off his comedic chops, turning his character’s increasingly unforgivable actions into chaotic bursts of tomfoolery. Yet the humour never comes at the expense of the biting themes, with even Man-su’s most absurd actions being layered with an uncomfortable but undeniable sense of relatability. Most of us, whether blue-collar or otherwise, have felt the stress of trying to secure a job that can provide for ourselves and others, especially in the modern age when technology and AI threaten to render our trades and expertise obsolete. We condemn what Man-su is doing, and recognise it for its foolishness, but, deep down, we understand why he’s doing it.
Director Park’s last film, the exhilarating Decision to Leave, blended hypnotic dissolve editing, gorgeously ominous music and cinematography so breathtaking you could frame it. No Other Choice follows suit, as it utilises the sharp editing of Kim Sang-bum and the articulate eye of Kim Woo-hyung to paint not just the morbid imagery of Man-su’s actions and consequent results but the scope of Man-su’s wicked ambitions. The architecture of the sets explodes with creative fervour, and overlay images convey the cost and desires of the characters’ hearts.
Like director Park’s best films, No Other Choice is also laden with symbolic imagery and recurring motifs. Chief among them is the erosion of morality. Man-su spends his murderous escapades dealing with a toothache, the pain getting worse and worse the more of himself he loses to his plans. All the while, his love of gardening, particularly of bonsai trees, proves blisteringly ironic, as his drive to re-enter an industry that chops down trees causes him to deface both the garden of his ethics and the literal garden surrounding his home.
Underlining the profound themes is a weighty sense of tragedy. Man-su spends the story convincing himself that his only way to provide for his family again is through his criminal actions. If this is indeed the case, then his targets are incorrect. Man-su goes after other struggling workers who occupy the same proverbial boat as him, when it was the head honchos at his previous work who caused him and his fellow workers the misery they endure. That the CEOs in this case are American is perhaps itself a commentary on naive South Korean subservience to American neo-colonialism, a reading that would make this film quite the interesting companion piece to Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host.
Whatever the case, director Park is staunchly advocating for class consciousness through the film’s preposterous humour and quietly thrilling components. That the film ends on such a bleakly hollow note, one that showcases how futile Man-su’s loss of morality really was, only enhances that vital sentiment.
No Other Choice does take a little bit of time to get going, and perhaps could’ve benefited from a few minutes of trimming down to tighten the pacing. But when the film flies, it soars. Deliciously morbid in its humour, but hauntingly satirical in its thematic resonance, No Other Choice rivets with its stellar visuals and sharp direction. With national movies as uniquely absorbing as this one still coming out, it seems as though Hallyu isn’t going away any time soon.
No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다) is playing at the BFI London Film Festival and will be released in cinemas on January 23, 2026.
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