Review: ‘No Other Choice’ is a haunting dark comedy that doesn’t let up
2025 / Dir. Park Chan-wook
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: Breaking Bad meets Parasite directed by the guy who did Old Boy and The Handmaiden. Or having a crisis of masculinity driven by the continued destruction of the middle class by AI and corporate profiteering, leading you to murder all your rivals to protect your identity at all costs.
When we meet Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun, Squid Game, I Saw the Devil), he’s jazzed that the first leaf of fall has dropped to the ground. He’s got the perfect upper-middle-class life: wife, two kids, two dogs, repurchased his eccentric childhood home, and is still riding high off being named “2019 Pulp Man of the Year” years earlier. He’s living a Leave It to Beaver dream life. What could go wrong? Americans are buying the paper company he works for and automatically cutting 20% of the workforce because they have “No Other Choice.” That’s what.
His wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin, Crash Landing on You) is clearly the glue that holds the family together and quickly comes up with a sustainable plan to keep the family afloat, even if it means selling the house. On the other hand, Man-su is so driven to maintain the status quo that he concocts a ridiculous scheme to murder his counterpart at another paper company to take his job, as well as any other “pulp man” who might also compete for it.
While it’s a bit slow for the scheme to get going, once he starts staking out his first target No Other Choice takes off as an absurd black comedy that doesn’t let up. Much of the macabre fun is Man-su’s hilariously bad attempts to murder people, where he comes across as a mix of Clark Griswold and Homer Simpson. Back at his first stakeout, he ends up getting bitten by a snake and then trying to spare the guy the indignity of finding out his wife is cheating on him with a younger, hotter man.
Part of the fun of No Other Choice is how this man drags himself and his family into what becomes a trademark Park Chan-wook movie. The opening hour is full of sunlight and garish pastel colors, but quickly grows darker and twisted, resembling a toned-down version of some of his operatic, Grand-Guignol spectacles (how he disposes of one of his targets is truly the stuff of nightmares). The director has a blast here constructing this world, particularly the very silly, idiosyncratic lives of all the pulp men who have a penchant for unique architecture, tactile hobbies, and careful sobriety.
Through that depiction of masculinity, akin to a parody of an archetypal Haruki Murakami character, Park explores how men have been defined by narrow roles (the provider, the hobbyist) and the identity crisis across the world when those roles are taken away. Man-su can articulate to one of the rivals he wants to kill how he should just move on from the paper life, but can’t find the way to do it himself; his only path forward is to cannibalize from his own class and try to grab whatever scraps are left.
There are the faintest bits of hope in No Other Choice that the sacrifices we make now may still give the next generation a shot. However, as with Eddington, we’re left with images of autonomous factories and machines that are just as bleak, if not more so, than many of the ultra-violent, gross-out sequences in Park’s earlier films. This may be a comedy, albeit nearly as dark as they come, but No Other Choice left me haunted more so than any horror film in 2025.