No Other Choice (2026)

Park Chan-wook brings his usual mayhem to his latest feature, the tale of an unemployed paper worker, You Man-su (Lee Byung hun) who hatches a plan to murder his way back into the job market by killing off the competition. Chan-wook's filmography is not to be sniffed at, as film fans will know, and No Other Choice offers another delicious left field turn for him, swerving into darkly satirical social satire as You Man-su's family struggle to survive as a unit while the head of the family remains unemployed.

You Man-su has worked for twenty-five years in the same paper company, but when it’s taken over by an American giant, they cull twenty percent of the work force, You included. He lives in an idyllic rural house that he initially grew up in then worked hard to buy back with his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) and they live with her teenage son from a previous marriage and their daughter- a cello prodigy who essentially only speaks through music, and their two Labradors. It’s the dogs that feel the pinch after You Man-su's severance, after a few months, they’re shipped off to grandparents much to the chagrin of the children.

Miri is initially extremely supportive of You’s struggles to find employment. He, and others in the same boat as we soon learn, find it difficult to even think about employment outside the paper industry. And after several failed interviews and growing disillusionment You Man-su eventually hatches a plan; he’ll place a fake add in a magazine, luring his competition to him, and pick them off. He’s desperate to get his life back on track as it starts to fall apart around him, with his wife having to find part time work, his daughter upset, and his son in trouble with the police- caught trying to steal phones to help his family keep their house.

The fact that You-Man su resorts to violence is directly attributable to his own fading manhood, as the title suggests and as he keeps repeating to himself in moments of high stress, he has no other choice. As well as executing the scenes in which You hunts his victims brilliantly, Park Chan-wook brings a genuine element of tension to proceedings, much in the same way as he did with The Handmaiden (2016) for example. But it’s in the blackly comedic sequences that No Other Choice falters slightly. The set-up for the film entices you with its potential, and it frequently delivers, but there are times in which the comedic sequences feel dragged out. One, in which You engages in a three-way fist fight with a potential victim and his wife feel deliberately stretched, and it doesn’t quite work.

At nearly two and a half hours, No Other Choice is too long, there’s no getting around it. It doesn’t have the visceral pull of Oldboy (2003), and despite being the same length, Chan-wook's last feature, 2022’s Decision To Leave felt concise and urgent. There’s so much going on here and not all of its necessary. The absurdist comedy works for stretches but falls apart on occasion, leaving for a mesh of a film that is often brilliant but sometimes frustrating. The performances, especially Lee Byung hun and Son Ye-jin are terrific, and genuinely sell you everything that’s unfurling in front of you, including the film’s solid ending. This isn’t Park Chan-wook's masterpiece as some have claimed, but even a lesser film from the Korean maestro is still very much something that deserves a trip to the cinema. 7.7/10