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PORTSIDE CULTURE
NO OTHER CHOICE IS ANOTHER MASTERPIECE BY PARK CHAN-WOOK
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Eileen Jones
January 24, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is a shocking, innovative, and
darkly comic film about the pressures of life under capitalism. It’s
more proof that the Oldboy director is nothing less than a cinematic
master. _
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice. , (CJ Entertainment)
I expected the intense hype surrounding Park Chan-wook’s _No Other
Choice_ would, when I finally saw it, inevitably make it less exciting
no matter how good it actually was. But the hype can’t even touch
it. It’s a great film that works in such unexpected ways, you
can’t really anticipate what you’re going to see from a typical
summary. It’s one of those rare films that discombobulates you and
silences your glib responses.
Based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, _The Ax_, previously adapted
by Costa-Gavras with his 2005 film, _The Axe_, Park’s _No Other
Choice_ is about an affluent paper mill manager, Yoo Man-su (Lee
Byung-hun), who’s devoted to his family, his idyllic home, and the
intensive work he performs on the job. We see him just before the
life-wrecking blow falls, when he’s on the patio barbequing the
family dinner in the summer heat, appreciating his happy situation but
looking forward to the cooler fall weather on the way. With ironic
prescience, he murmurs, “Come on, fall.”
But after the mill is taken over by an American company, he abruptly
loses his job for refusing to lay off his highly trained coworkers.
Crushed, Man-su is determined to find other work within three months
so he can go on tending his plants in the greenhouse he built himself;
his homemaker wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), can continue her tennis
lessons and dance lessons; his teenage son can lounge around pricing
the latest tech gadgets; his neurodivergent daughter, Ri-one, a gifted
cellist, can work with a more advanced music teacher; and the
family’s two golden retrievers can carry on gamboling around the yar
But intense competition in the labor market plus his severely dented
self-confidence means he’s still doing low-paid retail warehouse
work over a year later while continuing to hunt for a scarce
managerial position in a paper company. The family is driven to
desperate extremes. Mi-ri engages in severe cost-cutting — she
even gives away the family dogs, saying, “There are too many mouths
to feed.” It’s an alarming line daughter Ri-one repeats in a
disturbing singsong voice.
But soon it’s clear the house will also have to be sold, and
that’s the last straw for Man-su. He’d worked hard to recover the
house, which had once belonged to his parents, and he can’t face
losing it again. Realizing he’ll have to take drastic measures,
Man-su echoes the American boss who said, when preparing a ruthless
round of firings, “No other choice.”
Man-su decides to eradicate the competition. He creates a false
job-hiring ad for a paper mill manager in order to gather applications
and figure out who his top competitors are. Those three he plans to
murder, presuming he’ll then be hired as the last fully qualified
man standing.
From there, you might think you know what you’re in for in terms of
expeditious black comic murders. But it doesn’t go that way at all.
Each murder involves a specific, protracted process, undermined by the
fact that Man-su identifies with these other men that he’s
targeting. In order to do each murder, he gets to know too much about
their homes, wives, children, backgrounds, and how much they’ve
suffered to get as far as they got in their careers, only to lose it
all.
The first murder is naturally the clumsiest and takes the longest.
Man-su zeroes in on Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), a talented papermaker
who’s become an alcoholic during his long search for another job in
a fast-shrinking field. Nearly getting caught while spying on the
rural Goo home, Man-su gets to know the man’s unhappy wife, A-ra
(Yeom Hye-ran), who’s cheating on him. And Man-su’s identification
with Beom-mo becomes ever more troubling, as Man-su begins to suspect
Mi-ri is also cheating on him, and his own dark history as an
overworked, abusive alcoholic is revealed.
Man-su’s first murder attempt is so messy, it descends into mistaken
identity and a protracted slapstick comedy sequence in which the
question becomes, who will murder whom by the end of this scrum? If
you can’t handle wild tone shifts, a radically veering narrative,
and startling segues between scenes — some such artfully composited
shots and bold editing choices, you’ve never seen the like of them
before — you won’t be able to appreciate this film.
The few bad reviews _No Other Choice_ has gotten reflect outmoded
expectations of something smoother and more conventional, a kind of
filmic “well-made play” that continues to haunt the imaginations
of far too many critics. This film is going for a visceral
representation of life under capitalism, without resorting to mere
polemics. That means both the tragic and the surreally ludicrous are
represented in a rapid pile-on of mad events in such a way that the
ground seems to heave under the characters’ feet.
Any nostalgia you might have, about, say, an earlier era of industrial
capitalism when a necessary labor force made workers at least
_potentially _powerful, gets undercut brutally in _No Other Choice_.
Images of those skilled paper-mill workers and their beautiful,
satin-smooth products are subverted later with shots of giant
machinery hacking down forests and transporting loads of timber across
highways jammed with traffic.
Director Park goes for such a savage take on humanity’s ruinous time
as “stewards of the earth,” even Man-su tending his bonsai tree
— twisting and binding its small branches — is shot in such a
sadistic close-up, you’re made to wonder, not for the first time,
what is wrong with us as a species.
Human-made beauty coming out of widespread savagery, wreckage, and
pain, is one of _No Other Choice_’s unexpected themes that only
fully emerges by the very end. The narrative is haunted by the
consciousness of terrible human history contained within literal
buried bodies beneath characters’ homes, fertilizing their trees,
and getting dirt on their shoes. And atomization, the process by which
we are all forced apart into terrifying isolation, so that we each
wind up playing a lone hand against the impossible forces of our own
creation, has rarely been illustrated with such powerful imagery and
narrative clarity.
You have to see it. Park had exceptionally high ambitions for _No
Other Choice_, as he made clear in an interview
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way back in 2019:
I have had a lifetime project to make a film titled _The Ax_, Park
said in an open talk with Greek-French director Costa Gavras, held at
the Busan Cinema Center on Sunday, at the Busan International Film
Festival. “I’ve not yet started filming, but I wish to make this
film as my masterpiece.”
Well, he did it.
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Contributors
Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
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