No Other Choice (2025)
Park Chan-wook returns in 2025 with No Other Choice, a South Korean and French co-production that wears its genre labels, comedy, crime, thriller, with a studied looseness that feels entirely characteristic of the director. The film is adapted, in broad strokes, from Donald Westlake's 1993 novel The Ax, a mordant American satire about white-collar desperation and the violence lurking beneath the surface of respectable middle-class life. Westlake's source material has been transplanted here into a contemporary Korean context, and the fit is remarkably natural: the anxieties the novel prodded in the nineties, redundancy, obsolescence, the indignity of the modern job market, have only grown sharper in the intervening decades. The film's tagline, "Would you kill for a job?", is blunt to the point of being almost comical, which is, one suspects, precisely the tone Park is after.
The screenplay is credited to Park Chan-wook alongside Lee Kyoung-mi, with whom he has a longstanding working relationship, and Canadian writer Don McKellar, whose involvement points to the international scope of this co-production between CJ ENM Studios, Moho Film, and KG Productions. Park, of course, needs little introduction on a site that has already looked at The Handmaiden (2016), but it is worth noting that this film represents something of a tonal pivot even within his already wide range. Where films like Oldboy and The Handmaiden carry an operatic, almost suffocating intensity, No Other Choice has been pitched, by all accounts, at something cooler and more sardonic, closer in spirit to the pitch-black social comedies coming out of Korean cinema in recent years than to the baroque psychodrama for which Park first became famous abroad.
The principal cast is stacked in a way that would turn heads anywhere in the world. Lee Byung-hun, a genuinely magnetic screen presence whose coiled stillness was so striking in A Bittersweet Life (2005), takes the central role of the paper mill manager whose desperation curdles into something considerably darker. Son Ye-jin, one of the most respected dramatic actors working in South Korea today, plays his wife, and the supporting cast includes Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, and the reliably excellent Yeom Hye-ran, an ensemble that suggests the film has no weak links in its human architecture. Lee Sung-min in particular has built a reputation for the kind of controlled, slow-burning performance that suits a film like this well.
Behind the camera, cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, working with Park here, brings a visual register that balances the mundane and the menacing: clean, wide framings of ordinary domestic and industrial spaces that gradually accumulate a quiet dread, the kind of images where the very orderliness of the composition starts to feel slightly wrong. It is a look that suits a story about a world that presents itself as rational and meritocratic while operating on far crueller logic. The editing is handled by the team of Kim Sang-bum and Kim Ho-bin, both of whom have long been central to how Park constructs rhythm on screen, calibrating the film's shifts between dry comedy and genuine threat with the kind of precision that only comes from deep familiarity with a director's instincts. Jo Yeong-wook, another long-term Park collaborator who provided the scores for Oldboy and The Handmaiden, supplies the music here, and his work tends toward a certain ironic grandeur, orchestral gestures applied to situations that do not quite deserve them, which is exactly the register this material demands.
Few premises could feel more of the moment than this one: a man who has given a quarter of a century to the same company is abruptly made redundant when new owners decide that AI and automation can do his job for less.
What Park Chan-wook does with that painfully current set-up in No Other Choice is spin it into something wilder and blacker, a satirical thriller in which a decent, desperate family man, played by Lee Byung-hun, resolves to secure his future by quietly removing the rival candidates standing between him and re-employment. Adapted, loosely, from Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, it is Park working close to the top of his game.
This was my third Park Chan-wook film and, if I am keeping score, my third favourite of his, which, given the company, is no faint praise. Oldboy and The Handmaiden are two of the finest things I have seen from anyone, and No Other Choice does not quite scale those heights. But it comes nearer than most directors ever manage to their own peak, with the same fiendish control on show, the same glee in leading you one way before whipping the rug out from under you.
Halfway through, I half-wondered whether I had wandered into a Bong Joon-ho film by mistake, so strongly did it echo Parasite and that recent wave of sharp, class-conscious Korean cinema, which is no bad thing to resemble at all. The performances are superb across the board. Lee Byung-hun, whose coiled intensity stayed with me from A Bittersweet Life, is magnificent as a mild man slowly curdling into something darker, and Son Ye-jin matches him at every turn as his wife. The story is unpredictable in the best way, tautly paced and building to a payoff I never saw coming and would not dream of giving away.
Beneath the thriller machinery, it has something pointed to say. This is a film about the quiet terror of the modern worker: the fear of being rendered obsolete overnight, the brutal arithmetic of a job market where there is always someone younger, cheaper, or more mechanical ready to take your place. It carries that anger lightly, folding it into pitch-black comedy rather than a sermon, which only sharpens the sting.
It is not, for me, quite the equal of Park's very best, but that is about the highest bar in world cinema, and a lesser Park Chan-wook is still a class above nearly everyone else. A rich, vicious, four-star pleasure.
No Other Choice arrives at a moment when cinema, particularly from East Asia, is doing some of its most interesting work in this territory: stories that use genre mechanics to say something uncomfortable about class, labour, and the quiet humiliations of contemporary life. For viewers who came to Park Chan-wook through the psychological intensity of his earlier work, this film offers something slightly different in texture, though recognisable in craft. Those curious about how Korean cinema is continuing to develop the social-satirical vein that drew so much attention in recent years might also find it worthwhile to look back at Memories of Murder (2003), which feels, in retrospect, like an early marker on a long and still-unfinished road. No Other Choice, at 139 minutes, asks for your patience and rewards it. A lesser Park is still, it turns out, a very considerable thing.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-08-20
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for No Other Choice (2025) on YouTube
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