One Brilliant Korean Thriller Brutally And Hilariously Sums Up Everything Awful About 2025

This post contains spoilers for "No Other Choice."

Park Chan-wook opens "No Other Choice" with an idyllic snapshot of the nuclear family unit. Affluent salaryman Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) lives with his wife and two children in a beautiful country home, replete with a lush greenhouse and a gorgeous front yard. "I've got it all," Man-su muses, genuinely grateful to have everything that most can only dream of. But this cozy lifestyle is brutally ripped away from Man-su after he becomes a victim of corporate downsizing, where none of his accomplishments (and decades of hard work) matter in the face of capitalism's never-ending rat race. Given Park Chan-wook's ability to craft intense, rousing drama (look no further than his "Oldboy" or "Decision to Leave"), it's natural to expect a similar tone in "No Other Choice." This South Korean thriller is rife with tragic pathos, but it is also morbidly funny and deeply absurd at every turn.

It's tempting to think of Man-su as the everyman, but his socio-economic status (upper-middle class) becomes the crux of his increasingly extreme motivations. Of course, he is a man wronged by a broken system, callously discarded for no justified reason. But Man-su's anxieties have little to do with his inability to put food on the table — his primary concern is that his unemployment exposes him to social indignity. This is why the story demands such drastic escalation: As soon as Man-su clumsily plans to eliminate other promising candidates so he can secure a new job, Park Chan-wook translates this desperation through astounding match cuts, transitions, and zooms. Every reflective surface becomes a mirror into one's soul, and this deft visual mastery goes hand in hand with the farcical extremes of Man-su's violently chaotic journey.

But how does "No Other Choice" achieve such carefully choreographed chaos?

A job is never just a job in a hyper-capitalist society. It's a source of income that consumes a significant portion of our time, which is why it's connected to our sense of dignity and personal achievement. Such an economic system views unemployment as a personal failing, but it also creates a job crisis by controlling the means of production. We see this play out when Man-su fails to get another job for months (despite his qualifications), and paper-making suddenly becomes a niche, heavily automated industry.

Instead of challenging this troubling status quo, Man-su finds grotesque ways to play into it, having built his identity on a system designed to turn on workers like him (irrespective of their economic aspirations). His justification is that he has "no other choice" — surely, in his mind, murdering other workers he perceives as threats is the only way to reclaim his dignity. Park Chan-wook uses this ethical absurdity to present us with an anti-hero who turns every crime into Looney Tunes-like shenanigans, where Man-su awkwardly stalks his victims and improvises his serial kills. A particularly brilliant (and brutal) sequence involving a drunken tooth extraction takes this sentiment to extremes.

These instances of exaggerated physical comedy are hilarious, thanks to a taut script and Lee Byung-hun's intricately layered performance. We're never meant to root for him, but there's, ahem, no other choice but to sympathize with someone so terribly disturbed by his inability to reclaim a lifestyle he's been accustomed to. The results are unhinged, as Man-su must discard his humanity (and decency) to become employed again. This pointed satire feels substantial because of the film's impressive visual language, which stuns us just as much as Man-su's escalating moral bankruptcy.

In "Decision to Leave," Park Chan-wook uses quick cuts/transitions to flit between different viewpoints, which are used to flesh out the film's central relationship. Texting overlays are also used to great effect, juxtaposed against the micro-expressions of people involved in digital conversation. Similarly, "No Other Choice" uses tablets, phone screens, and bathroom mirrors to gauge character motivation, which reach diabolical extremes with each passing minute.

For example, we see Man-su's moral point of no return when a box containing his father's gun is juxtaposed against his desperate, anxiety-riddled demeanor. Also, a murder investigation unfolds at one point, during which the reflective surface of a laptop is used to switch perspectives and convey the unspoken thought process of every character. Such visual mastery may feel like unfettered improvisation, but it's the result of painstaking skill and precision.

This visual language feeds into the film's dense (albeit unsubtle) symbolism. Towards the end, Man-su inadvertently nourishes his beloved apple tree with corpses, signifying that his now-blooming career and reinstated social status come at a horrifying cost. This is when the tragicomic nature of Man-su's arc feels especially bitter, as the film dangles the idea that late-stage capitalism makes it easy for us to turn a blind eye to the atrocities that shape our reality. Man-su knows his actions are wrong, but it's easy to push guilt or remorse aside when barbecued eel is back on the menu again. This is also why his wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), remains silently complicit, as she realizes that the only way to win a rigged game is to accept moral compromise as an inevitability. 

"No Other Choice" is currently in limited release.