LFF Review: ‘No Other Choice’
Park Chan-wook is a master of cinema. Few filmmakers working today possess such complete control over image, tone and performance, and No Other Choice is yet another reminder of just how effortlessly he can take material that should not work, push it in half a dozen different directions at once and somehow emerge with something exhilaratingly coherent on the other side.
Smart, viciously funny, thrilling and almost unbearably tense, No Other Choice is a pitch-black satire that turns the indignity of unemployment into something approaching a nightmare. It is often hilarious, frequently nerve-wracking and so meticulously constructed that even its wildest tonal swings feel entirely deliberate.
Based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, the film follows Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a paper manufacturing specialist who has spent 25 years working in the industry and believes he has finally built the life he always wanted. He has a wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), two children, two dogs and the family home he fought so hard to obtain. Then, almost without warning, he is laid off. What Man-su initially believes will be a temporary setback stretches into more than a year of rejection, humiliation and increasingly desperate attempts to find another position in the only industry he knows. When even getting his foot through the door at another paper company proves impossible, he arrives at an increasingly deranged solution: if there is no job opening available to him, he will simply have to create one.
It is the kind of premise that could easily sustain a straightforward black comedy, and there are certainly stretches of No Other Choice that are riotously funny. But Park is interested in something far more complicated than watching an increasingly desperate man eliminate his competition one by one. Beneath the bloodshed and absurdity is a painfully recognizable portrait of someone whose entire sense of identity has been built around his ability to provide, only to discover how quickly that identity can disappear when a company decides he is no longer useful.
Lee Byung-hun is phenomenal, delivering what may very well be the best performance of his career. Man-su is compelling precisely because Lee never allows him to become simply pathetic, monstrous or ridiculous, even as the film gives him ample opportunity to be all three. There is something deeply sad about watching him scramble to preserve a version of his life that is already disappearing, convincing himself that every increasingly indefensible decision is simply another necessary step towards getting things back to normal.
Lee finds the comedy in that desperation without ever sacrificing the character underneath it. A look of panic can suddenly become hilarious; an awkward interaction can transform into something genuinely threatening within seconds. He is constantly calibrating Man-su’s humiliation, entitlement, fear and mounting desperation, creating a character who becomes more fascinating the further he moves beyond the boundaries of rational behavior.
Most importantly, Lee never plays the absurdity from the outside. Man-su does not believe he is living in a black comedy. To him, every setback is catastrophic and every new plan completely reasonable. That commitment allows Park to push the character into increasingly outrageous territory without breaking the film’s reality, and Lee somehow manages to make his descent both horrifying and enormously entertaining to watch.
That balance is also where Park’s direction becomes invaluable. No Other Choice moves through comedy, domestic drama, social satire and thriller with astonishing fluidity. A sequence can begin with such ridiculous comic energy that you find yourself laughing, only for Park to tighten the screws almost imperceptibly until that laughter turns into genuine anxiety. Then, just as the tension becomes almost unbearable, he finds another unexpected release.
The tonal shifts should be disorienting. Instead, they are one of the film’s greatest pleasures. Park understands exactly how long to hold a shot, when to interrupt an apparently serious moment with something ridiculous and, perhaps most importantly, when to stop being funny altogether. There is an extraordinary precision to the filmmaking, with every camera movement, edit and visual gag seemingly engineered to keep the audience slightly off balance. You are never entirely sure whether the next scene is going to make you laugh or make your stomach drop.
Often, it does both. And while the film is undeniably entertaining, its absurdity never obscures what Park is saying about work, capitalism and the increasingly precarious idea that professional usefulness somehow determines personal worth. Man-su has spent decades believing that experience and loyalty should guarantee security. The world around him has moved on without asking his permission. Companies restructure, workers become disposable and technology continues marching forward regardless of who gets left behind.
It would have been very easy for those ideas to overwhelm the film, particularly given how directly its premise lends itself to social commentary. But Park rarely allows No Other Choice to become a lecture. The satire emerges through Man-su’s behavior, the humiliations he suffers and the increasingly warped logic he develops in response to them. Even when the film broadens its scope, it remains rooted in one deeply flawed man desperately attempting to regain control of his life.
And that is perhaps why the film remains so tense even when it is at its funniest. Man-su is constantly improvising, constantly one mistake away from disaster, and Park stretches several sequences to almost sadistic lengths. There are moments where you find yourself physically bracing for what might happen next, only for the film to find yet another complication and keep the sequence going.
By the time No Other Choice reaches its final stretch, the film has spent more than two hours repeatedly threatening to spiral completely out of control. Somehow, Park never lets it. That may be the most impressive thing about it. No Other Choice is dense with ideas, constantly changing shape and populated by characters making increasingly terrible decisions, yet it never feels unwieldy. Park directs with such confidence that every strange detour, tonal shift and escalation feels like part of the same carefully orchestrated descent.
The result is a film that is smart without becoming self-satisfied, funny without undercutting its darkness and thrilling without sacrificing the ideas underneath it. Lee Byung-hun gives an extraordinary performance at its center, finding endless shades within a man whose desperation becomes simultaneously more horrifying and more understandable with every passing minute.
No Other Choice will leave you on the edge of your seat. The only problem is that by the time it ends, you will probably wish you could stay there a little longer.
Rating: 4.5/5
No Other Choice screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.