by Albert Pears
Park Chan-wook has made a movie about a man who sets out to commit murder to get a job, and somehow managed to make it the funniest film of the year—a comedy so black it seems to swallow all the light around it and leave you wondering why you’re laughing so hard at something so genuinely horrifying. “No Other Choice” is that rarest of achievements: a film that works on you like a strange infection, making you complicit in its protagonist’s crimes even as it systematically dismantles every justification he offers for them. It’s a movie about self-deception that never lets you deceive yourself about what you’re watching.
Lee Byung-hun plays Yoo Man-su, a paper industry expert with twenty-five years of experience and a house full of things that define him—a wife who plays tennis, a daughter who plays cello for the dogs but not for people, a stepson with his own quiet rebellions, a greenhouse full of lovingly tended trees. He’s good at his job. He likes his coworkers. He taps on the drums with them to check for blockages in the machinery. Then an American company buys out his employer and he’s among thousands thrown out like yesterday’s memo, and thirteen months later he’s working retail, losing everything piece by piece—the tennis lessons, the dance classes, the dogs shipped off to live with in-laws, the Netflix subscription cancelled like some final admission of defeat—and still refusing to consider any alternative to getting exactly what he had back. When his wife gently suggests he might look into a different field, or that they might downsize their lifestyle, you can see something close in his face, a door shutting. Man-su isn’t interested in adaptation. He’s interested in restoration. And if that means eliminating the other candidates competing for the same specialized position at a rival company, well—what other choice does he have?
The title is Park’s little joke at our expense, and at Man-su’s. Because of course there are other choices, dozens of them, and Man-su knows this as clearly as we do. He sees his victims as having other choices even as he denies the existence of his own. He’s not stupid. He’s something worse: he’s convinced himself that his moral compromises are just pragmatism, that the system has forced his hand, that he’s doing what any loving father would do to protect his family. Park understands something essential about how people become monsters—not through some dramatic break with conscience but through an accumulating series of small internal negotiations, each one making the next one easier. Man-su doesn’t suddenly decide to become a killer. He slides into it, rationalizing every inch of the way, and Lee Byung-hun plays this slow-motion moral collapse with a precision that’s almost unbearable to watch.
What makes the performance so extraordinary is how Lee makes you feel for this man even as he does increasingly terrible things. There’s a quality of haplessness to Man-su’s villainy that edges into something almost tender—he’s so bad at being bad, so visibly uncomfortable with the requirements of murder, so fundamentally convinced that this isn’t really him, this isn’t what he’s like. When he stakes out his first target, a fellow unemployed specialist named Goo Beom-mo who’s drinking himself into oblivion while his wife, a struggling actress, cheats on him with a younger man, we can see Man-su developing something like sympathy. He learns Beom-mo’s routines. He watches him try to repair his marriage. He gets bitten by a snake while spying on the couple—perhaps a mamushi, perhaps something worse; the characters themselves argue about what kind it might be—and is saved by the very wife whose husband he’s planning to kill, an actress who once played a medic and insists she knows what she’s doing. And then when he finally corners Beom-mo, the scene turns into such a ridiculous farce—loud music drowning out their confrontation, the wife suddenly involved, a three-way struggle for the gun—that you find yourself laughing helplessly even as you watch the situation spiral out of control. In a delicious twist of irony, Man-su can’t even succeed at being a murderer: it’s A-ra, the wife, who pulls the trigger, killing her husband out of her own accumulated frustrations. Man-su flees the scene having failed at the very crime he meticulously planned. Park stages it like a scene from a B-movie playing inside a tragedy, the absurdity and the horror so tightly wound together that they become the same thing.
That first confrontation may be the best scene of the year in any film, but it’s the details throughout that make “No Other Choice” feel so complete, so fully imagined. The toothache that Man-su ignores throughout the film, a rotting molar that mirrors his rotting soul, finally yanked out with brutal directness before the final murder because he doesn’t need the pain anymore to tell him he’s doing something wrong—he already knows. The way his wife Mi-ri, played by Son Ye-jin with a watchfulness that suggests depths the film only lets us glimpse, slowly comes to understand what her husband has done and chooses not to choose, to maintain the fiction of their family even knowing what poisons its roots. The neurodivergent daughter who wouldn’t let anyone listen to her play cello and who now, with stability restored, finally performs for her mother—a gift purchased with blood money, though she doesn’t know it. The greenhouse where Man-su tends his beloved bonsai trees, that sanctuary of control and cultivation, becomes a crime scene when his stepson witnesses him through the glass, wrapping a body the way he would wrap an unruly plant. And then the apple tree in the front yard, freshly planted over the buried corpse—Park making the metaphor almost unbearably literal. Here is a family growing from rotten roots.
Park has always been interested in moral complexity, in characters whose actions we cannot entirely condemn even when we know we should. But “No Other Choice” feels different from his earlier work—looser, funnier, more willing to let its bleakness play as comedy. The French adaptation of Donald Westlake’s source novel, “Le Couperet,” presented its killer as confident, even justified; Park turns Man-su into a figure of embarrassment and shame, a man we laugh at as often as we laugh with. The comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is inevitable—both are Korean films about capitalism grinding people into desperate competition with each other, both blend dark humor with genuine horror—but where “Parasite” was about the rich and the poor, “No Other Choice” is about the poor and the poorer, about people who might be friends or colleagues in a different world tearing each other apart for table scraps. The system barely appears on screen. We never see the American company that bought Man-su’s employer, never meet the executives who decided his fate. We only see people like him, equally desperate, equally vulnerable, equally convinced they have no other choice.
And then there’s the ending, which lands like a slow punch to the stomach. Man-su wins. He gets the job. He keeps his house. His family returns to something like normalcy. But the job he fought so hard for turns out to be overseeing machines in an empty factory, a trial run for full automation that will probably make even his position obsolete within years. He moves through the darkened facility, fist-pumping in hollow triumph, surrounded by cold machinery, utterly alone. The credits roll over footage of trees being violently uprooted by industrial equipment—the forests that make the paper that makes the documents that reduce human lives to pink slips and quarterly reports. What Man-su sacrificed his humanity to preserve was always already dying. The drive toward efficiency doesn’t just exploit; it uproots. It takes everything and leaves you standing in an empty room, alone with machines, waiting for the next satisfying thud of the axe.
