FILM OF THE WEEK: No other Choice - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Park Chan-wook has spent his career circling a set of obsessions: power curdling into cruelty; desire entangled with guilt; and social systems that reward obedience until they destroy the obedient. His films are rarely about violence alone, but about the psychological rituals that make violence feel justified to those committing it. From Oldboy through The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave, Park always returns to characters trapped inside moral mazes of their own construction, filmed with a sensuous precision that makes corruption look deliberate.

No Other Choice fits into that lineage while feeling uncannily prescient. Its satire is rooted in the everyday language of corporate survival: restructuring, new technologies, efficiency, competitiveness. At a time when A.I., automation, layoffs, and permanent precarity have become the background noise of modern employment, Park’s film lands with bruising relevance, particularly given the innocent, analogue material at its centre: paper. The title phrase repeats throughout the film like a corporate prayer, muttered by executives and workers alike, each using it to absolve themselves of responsibility.

That such a film has been overlooked by the Academy feels depressingly predictable. No Other Choice is too acidic to inspire uplift, and too sharp to leave its audience feeling unimplicated in its message.

The story centres on Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran employee at a paper manufacturing company. The opening movements depict a life of serene stability: a devoted wife (Son Yejin), two children, two golden retrievers, a beautiful house filled with plants and memories. He has done everything right, he has been rewarded, he has allowed himself to feel safe in this life, but in once single corporate manoeuvre, it's all taken away.

Park stages this descent with deceptive gentleness. The early passages play with idyllic visuals and flirt with sitcom rhythms, buoyed by Man-su’s stubborn optimism and refusal to acknowledge humiliation. When the film finally tips into violence, it does so not as eruption but as escalation. Man-su decides that if job hunting is competition, then competition can be removed. What follows is a series of murders conceived of with ruthless ingenuity and enacted with messy, fumbling, human incompetence, unfolding less like a thriller than like an increasingly deranged management strategy.

The tone is Park at his most perverse and controlled. Much of the film plays as elaborate farce, with slapstick choreography, precise comic timing, and scenes that exist on the border between panic and absurdity. The consequences of each farcical incident accumulate, until the film has transformed into something resembling an existential horror. Man-su’s intended victims all have their own lives, struggles, idiosyncrasies, making their interactions both more specific in their absurdity, and more bleak in their specificity.

Beneath the black comedy lies Park’s pointed social critique. No Other Choice is not just about unemployment, but about how masculine identity is welded to productivity. That paranoia around female infidelity arises repeatedly is not a coincidence: this is a society of men fearing emasculation in their personal and professional lives. Man-su cannot imagine a self outside his work. Paper is not just a job but a signifier of his role, worth, and sense of order in the world. To abandon it would mean admitting that loyalty, skill, and seniority no longer matter. In this worldview, murder becomes less unthinkable than reinvention.

Lee Byung-hun, always solid, gives a fantastic performance. He makes Man-su sympathetic without ever sanitizing him, capturing the terror beneath the politeness and the pride beneath the desperation. Visually, the film is among Park’s most confident achievements. Working with cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, he constructs frames of almost decadent elegance. A single mid-film home invasion sequence, involving deafening music and domestic chaos, stands as a master class in spatial storytelling, balancing terror and comedy without sacrificing coherence.

No Other Choice occasionally overindulges in its own virtuosity, with its messy excess echoing the actions of its main character. But while the structure occasionally lags in pacing and feels somewhat bloated, every narrative swerve leads us to one, inescapable conclusion: that capitalism rewards monstrosity until it’s no longer useful. In an era of A.I. threatening jobs, the housing crisis creating a false sense of scarcity, and right-wing rhetoric intentionally creating division, the ways in which capitalism turns us on each other is deeply felt. The fact that the film is too unruly, too human, too pointed to be rewarded by an Academy of rich people in Hollywood might just prove its point.

Directed by Park Chan-wook. Written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Jahye Lee, based on the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake. Cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung. Edited by Kim Sang-beom, KimHo-bin. Starring Lee Byung Hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee Soon, Lee Sung Min, Yeom Hye Ran, Cha Seung Won, Choi So Yul, Kim Woo Seung, Kim Hyeongmook, Oh Dal Soo, Lee Suk Hyeong. 139 mins In cinemas now.

• Watch the trailer below: