Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | October 29, 2025
Paper! What’s it good for? An excellent question to ask as you read this review on your computer and/or phone screens. Is it an antiquated connection to Nature, to tactility? Or is it the first spark that burned down all the world’s forests; the original sin domino that damned humanity to eventual climate catastrophe and A.I. overlord oblivion? And why not both? That’s just one of the million-dollar questions that bob delicately on by in the background of Park Chan-wook’s latest maniacal triumph, the darkly comic capitalism satire No Other Choice, which sees the forest for the trees and diagnoses us all chainsaws.
But first, some history. Twenty-five years ago, early on in both of their careers, South Korean director Park and the actor Lee Byung-hun made the stellar border-thriller Joint Security Area together. A big success both critically and financially, that movie catapulted the two of them onto their (mostly) separate paths toward international success. (They did work together again briefly in 2004 for Park’s bizarre and baroque portion of the ace horror anthology Three Extremes.)
After that initial collaboration Park would go on to become regarded as one of modern cinema’s great masters with big bold films like Oldboy, Decision To Leave, and The Handmaiden. And Lee sauntered off to make himself a bonafide movie star thanks to choice stuff like The Good, the Bad, and the Weird and I Saw the Devil. The both of them tried their hands at English-language projects too, Park faring better quality-wise with his extremely underrated film Stoker in 2013 and his marvelous miniseries The Little Drummer Girl in 2018. Lee definitely got more eyes on his output though, flashing his world-class smile-and-abs combo across supporting roles in American sequels in the G.I. Joe, Red, Terminator, and Rush Hour franchises. (And that was before he landed the role of the big baddie in a little something called Squid Game in 2021.)
Now twenty-five years on, the two have propitiously careened back into one another’s paths for No Other Choice, a scathing romp that successfully posits murder as the only way to get ahead in this garbage-fire world of ours. Watch and wonder as the paper-thin distance between paycheck and panic is torn asunder by vicious slapstick—pitched somewhere between Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and the Coens’ A Serious Man, this is Park gone as deranged as his obsessive-compulsions will allow him. With Lee matching the director step by step, wielding his mega-watt charisma as a most deadly weapon. Oh how great to have these two great tastes reunited!
Twenty-five years also happens to be the amount of time that Man-su (Lee) has been working his way up to a lofty managerial position at Solar Paper when we first meet him. Why, he even won the “Pulp Man of the Year” award! Beaming a big dumb smile as he grills pricey eels that his company’s just gifted him, he takes a moment, looks around himself, and sees he’s standing in his beautiful home’s yard, surrounded by his loving wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin, a marvel who almost steals the movie from Lee), teen son Si-one (Kim Woo Seung), and cello prodigy daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul)—oh and two wildly enthusiastic Golden Retrievers named Ri-two and Si-two too, natch. Idyllic much?
A slight change in the wind sends cascades of pink petals snowing down around them—perfectly picturesque as the sun passes behind a cloud, all shimmering and glimmering with technicolor warmth, Man-su wraps his arms wide around all that he loves and smiles. Sensing with no foul premonitions about it he states happily that “Fall is coming.” And not since the Book of Job has one man been so right about all that.
Within twenty-four hours, Man-su will’ve been downsized out of his job (he should’ve seen those eels for the horse’s head in his bed, they were), sending him spiralling off into the tumble-about tornado that is losing the one thing you’ve been defining your entire self-worth via. Who even is he without paper? Is he a paper tiger? A straw man? Swept up sawdust blowing away in the wind?
As his selfhood crisis extends across the months of dwindling severance pay, a diabolical thought comes galloping toward him, birthed out of desperation—perhaps he’s a psychopath? One born out of necessity. Circumstance. As his resume sits rejected, he realizes there are other people more qualified for the positions he wants, and obviously—they gotta go.
It’s as inevitable and natural as sunshine and the clouds that must rumble past. No Other Choice wields its title like a fascist on the witness stand—everybody’s just doing their job, after all. His bosses had “no other choice” but to fire him. And he in turn has “no other choice” than to start murdering his competition for ever-dwindling positions in his field. No Other Choice is based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax—as in everybody’s getting it, metaphorically and literally, upside their blindsided melons. The way of this world.
Unfortunately, while Man-su might’ve made for an excellent paper man, it turns out he makes for a terrible maniac. His plan, as originally plotted, is solid enough—but as it goes with most managers he can’t actually get it done when he’s out in the field. And Park revels in the dope’s mismanagement—the desperation and fury that No Other Choice feels toward our unsustainable and inhumane economic systems aside, this is easily the director’s most broadly funny film to date. Pratfalls galore! Man-su bumbles everything, and Park’s movie follows suit—what might’ve been a tightly plotted murder spree is instead sprawling and purposefully messy, with unexpected (and delightful) tangents and many a zag where a zig seemed forthcoming.
A good heft of this falls onto the relationship between Man-su and his wife Mi-ri—a case could be made that this movie’s as much about a loving marriage withstanding financial weather as it is about the degradation and humiliation of modern employment. Anyway Lee and Son are so absolutely wonderful together they make the movie feel like it’s about their relationship above all else—while Lee’s making a spectacle of spectacularly crumbling, Son’s the one nudging things into some shape, gently gifting us with yet another top-tier gem in Park’s now-enormous arsenal of kick-ass female characters. This is stealth her movie and she’s absolute magic.
But as Wife Guy as he might be, Man-su’s tragedy is he really sees himself as self-made. He eventually managed to build up his dream house on the same land where his father once had a pig farm. But like his tragic father—who we learn had to murder and bury all of his pigs on the same land when they got sick, and who then killed himself out of despair—everything is a germ’s breadth away from absolute ruination. The brutal lessons he learns twisting in Park Chan-wook’s grip are ones we’re all feeling the fists of—we’re all being strangled, and the earth stretches out like a field of bones in every direction. Now you make all of that wickedly funny, you make all of that moving and sweet movie magic, and that’s how you get to be Park Chan-wook, I guess. Nobody’s downsizing this master any time soon.
No Other Choice was reviewed out of the New York Film Festival. It hits American screens on Christmas Day.
