A veteran paper company executive, proud winner of the “Pulp Man of the Year” award, has it all – a loving wife, two children, two dogs, two cars and a sprawling ancestral home. Just how precarious corporate life can be is revealed to Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when his firm is bought over by Americans and he is laid off.
Everything by which Man-su measures his success is about to disappear. He promises his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) that he will be back in his beloved paper industry in three months, but there aren’t any positions for him. Man-su decides that the best way to beat the competition is to eliminate it, literally.
This is a Park Chan-wook movie, so it’s neither straight-forward in its telling nor simplistic in its morality. No Other Choice (2025), the South Korean director’s adaptation of Donald E Westlake’s novel The Ax – which also yielded the Costa-Gavras film The Axe (2005) – is forever inviting us to root for Man-su as he sets out to murder his rivals. Man-su’s mission is selfish and cruel but also darkly comic and moving – a humane tale of despair in brutal times.
No Other Choice, which is out on MUBI, was bizarrely overlooked at the Oscars. Alongside One Battle After Another, Sinners and The Secret Agent, Chan-wook’s latest feat of mischief is one of the films of the moment.
No Other Choice is possibly one of the funniest and saddest movies about trying to dodge the wrecking ball of rampaging capitalism. The overall wicked mood resembles Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019); the sideways empathy for a family being riven by unemployment is a bit like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008).
The staging and pacing are vintage Park Chan-wook. There is biting comedy alongside graphic violence and moments of tenderness. Characters are trapped within boxy sets that have Escher-like stairs. The skewed camera angles and sudden zooms indicate a world spinning out of orbit. Only imbalance can restore the balance.
The 139-minute film is stretched out at times – Chan-wook and his co-writers cheekily test the patience of viewers as well as their bloodlust. Man-su’s transformation from sacked employee into deadly killer is gradual, only after we have gotten to know his targets better.
They deserve better, these equally hapless men, not just from Man-su but also from the system that has failed them. The female characters are equally well-rounded, fully participating in the goings-on without self-pity or sentimentality.
Few directors can make perversity entertaining while also implicating the revellers. Chan-wook’s skewed vision is carried out by a superlative bunch of actors, led by Lee Byung-hun.
Lee delivers an all-time-great performance that is both intensely physical and emotionally resonant. Man-su’s facial contortions and bodily jerks are of a person who has been twisted out of shape by forces beyond his control. This is how businesses dehumanise individuals, No Other Choice declares – by rendering them into cartoonish figures forced to deal with very real situations.
Every interaction for Man-su is reduced to a contest, even a dance performance. His manhood under severe strain, Man-su grins and grimaces his way to an ending that’s a final, brilliant kick in the teeth of inhuman corporate culture.
Just 0.2% of readers pay for news. The others don’t care if it dies. You can help make a difference. Support independent journalism – join Scroll now.
We’re not driven by clicks or corporate interests – just honest, independent reporting. Keep us going. Support Scroll today!