LFF 2025: No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook returns with uneven anti-corporate satire
Festival Review: No Other Choice (dir. Park Chan-wook)
Plot in a nutshell
Man-soo (Lee Byung-hoo) has it all. Two kids, two dogs, his wonderful wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), a fantastic house and a great job at the paper company he’s been in for 25 years. But when he loses his job, this picture perfect life is jeopardized. He decides to take drastic measures to ensure he gets out of unemployment hell.
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is hellishly entertaining; an extremely dark comedy about a desperate family man trying to keep it all together after losing his job and making one desperate choice after next to do so. The fact that a paper company is simultaneously the centre of all his worries and the solution to all of his problems, with rival paper companies very much part of the plot, immediately calls to mind The Office, one of the greatest TV shows of all time and certainly the funniest one about a paper company.
Park sinks his teeth into the same corporate elements The Office fans are familiar with; the paralyzing prospect of unemployment and redundancies, the corporate rat race, the cold indifference of upper management and the camaraderie of work friends which can turn sour on a dime. The picture that’s painted about people’s dependence on their jobs as a result is equal parts fiendish, hilarious and a rallying cry. The modern phenomenon of workaholism and how imprisoned our way of life is to mindless corporate culture is at the epicenter of the film’s question: is there a choice?
Of course there is always a choice, but Park sadistically traps his audience in a spiral of horrible ones made by Man-soo. Byung-hun (The Front Man from Squid Games) is truly superb, delivering one of the performances of the year as a nervous wreck of a man whose survival instinct is fueled by the adoration of his family.
No Other Choice is replete with symbolism, not being able to see clearly because of direct sunlight being a very a big one. We are all too blind to see the better choices in front of us. Too riddled with anxiety to stop and think of a better solution, guilty conscience (in the form of a persistent toothache in the film) be damned.
All that’s well and good, but here’s the trouble. Park gets a little too drunk on his own style, where seemingly every scene has to have some kind of stylistic flourish, which starts to feel a bit gimmicky. The choices Man-soo makes get increasingly sillier and bloodier, and the whole film ends up being a bit of an uneven mess because of it. The goofiness especially creates narrative vacuums where you’re just left wondering “why?” while it plays out like a sordid comedy of error after error.
Movies like this live and die by their endings, and this one is lacking in a few key ways, but spoilers prevent me from going any further than that. Suffice it to say that No Other Choice is a fun ride and satirical parable with a critical message, delivered in a bit of a sloppy way, on the importance of a healthy work-life imbalance.
I like how you describe the toothache shown as “guilty conscience.” I actually enjoyed this movie a lot, mostly because of Lee Byun Hun’s performance, thought it was perfect.