No Other Choice (2025)
Few premises could feel more of the moment than this one. A man gives a quarter of a century to the same company, and then, one day, new owners decide that AI and automation can do his job for less. He is out. Just like that. No sentiment, no severance worth speaking of, just the cold arithmetic of a balance sheet where human beings are a line item to be trimmed. If that lands with a particular dread right now, it is because it should.
What Park Chan-wook does with that set-up is spin it into something wilder and blacker than you might expect: 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. Loosely adapted from Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, it is Park working close to the top of his game, which is saying something.
This is my third Park Chan-wook film and, keeping score honestly, my third favourite of his. That is not faint praise. The Handmaiden (2016) is one of the finest things I have seen from anyone, full stop, and No Other Choice does not quite scale those heights. But it comes nearer than most directors ever manage to their own peak. The fiendish control is all there, the same glee in leading you one direction before whipping the rug clean out from under you. Park trusts his audience, and rewards that trust in the final act with a payoff I genuinely did not see coming, and would not dream of spoiling here.
Halfway through, I half-wondered whether I had wandered into a Bong Joon-ho film by mistake. The echoes of Parasite are strong, that same sharp, class-conscious fury wrapped in genre mechanics, that same insistence on making you laugh even as the knife goes in. It is no bad thing to resemble. Both films are working the same vein of modern dread, the fear of being made obsolete, of discovering that the system you served faithfully was never really looking out for you in return.
Lee Byung-hun is magnificent. I have carried his coiled intensity around with me since I watched A Bittersweet Life (2005), and here he does something different and arguably harder: he plays a mild man, a good man by most measures, slowly curdling into something darker, and he makes you follow every step of that transformation without losing your sympathy entirely. Son Ye-jin matches him throughout as his wife, grounding the film in domestic warmth even as the plot spirals into violence and very black comedy. The performances across the board are superb.
The film carries its anger lightly, which only sharpens the sting. It is not delivering a lecture about automation or capitalism. It is doing something subtler: it is putting you inside the head of a man making monstrous decisions with an almost bureaucratic calm, and asking you to recognise the logic, however horrifying. That is uncomfortable territory, and Park sits in it with evident pleasure.
Four stars. Not quite the equal of Park's very best, but that is about the highest bar in world cinema. A lesser Park Chan-wook is still a class above nearly everyone else, and No Other Choice is a rich, vicious, thoroughly satisfying piece of work.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-08-20
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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