☆☆☆½
In the endlessly fascinating, book-length interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, Hitchcock says of his work in Psycho: "You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what's actually going to happen." Hitchcock would have delighted in Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice.
The movie is based on an English-language novel called The Ax, which has been filmed twice before and was written 30 years ago, but it's easy to see why its story keeps attracting filmmakers. The similarly themed Michael Caine movie A Shock to the System comes to mind, too, because all three imagine the lengths people — well, let's be clear about this: men — will go to when they lose their jobs.
No Other Choice reimagines the story for South Korea, setting it not just in the present but, very specifically now, in this particular moment. It's rendered so perfectly that when the children of Yoo Man-soo, the man who's let go from his 25-year job at the start of the movie, hear that the household needs to take austerity measures, the news that hits them hardest is that they need to cancel Netflix.
They'll also need to get rid of the dogs. Sell the house. Change their lives. And it's all too much for Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun of Squid Games) and his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin). They're knocked for a loop by the news.
Man-soo's career has hardly been as a standard businessman; his whole career has been built in producing specialized paper. In the AI-driven, electronic age, paper just isn't what it used to be. (Though when the film starts listing all the different kinds of paper the world still uses, it's a little dizzying.) Paths are closed to fiftysomething Man-soo. The industry just doesn't have a need for him.
It isn't so much that Man-soo and a huge number of his co-workers find themselves unemployed that's the problem, one character says. It's how they're handling it.
The good news is that there are still job openings. But they're few and far between. They're the kind of jobs people like Man-soo might casually say that they'd kill for. Which is what Man-soo does. The film's setup isn't the surprise. The surprise is what happens when he gets determined to follow through. Another Hitchcock quote comes to mind: "One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life."
So, even while Man-soo considers who he might need to target and the lengths he'll need to go to for that job opportunity, not much goes to plan. There wouldn't be much suspense if it did. And suspense is what Park Chan-wook does best: From a living room skirmish that gets massively out of hand to a decision about how to dispose of a body, No Other Choice keeps the audience both squirming and uncertain of what might happen next.
But somewhere along the line, the film's many subplots become a little too hard to track. No Other Choice loses some steam as it brings in detectives who may or may not suspect Man-soo. Their presence complicates matters just when things should become more clear, while motives and key developments get just a little too murky. Even in its lesser moments, though, there's a huge saving grace: Park is a consummate filmmaker.
There are visuals in No Other Choice that are downright stunning, and one scene of a man and a woman talking to each other on a mobile phone — hardly the stuff of cinematic innovation — becomes an incredible visual moment, one in which characters, their motivations, their culpability and their desires all intersect while keeping the dialogue simple and mundane.
It's a film of visual wonders, a movie that conveys its emotion through the use of pure cinema, evoking the best of Hitchcock while cementing Park as one of the all-time great cinema technicians, even in service to a story that could have been just a bit tighter.
Viewed January 3, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse L.A.
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