{"id":82476,"date":"2026-09-12T10:53:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T02:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=82476"},"modified":"2026-09-12T10:53:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T02:53:28","slug":"no-other-choice-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=82476","title":{"rendered":"No Other Choice (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Park Chan Wook’s latest is once again filled with murder. Unlike the past crime thrillers that established his reputation however, No Other Choice<\/em> is a comedy and I think not a good one at all. The comedic timing is off, the film itself is too long and most of all, the main character is so blatantly evil it’s impossible to sympathize with him. It seems I’m the outlier here as most critics loved it as a critique of capitalism. However since I’m in favor of fair competition, I think actually murdering your competitors is not that at all and so I found this to be highly offensive to my sensibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Man-su, a senior manager at a papermaking company, seemingly has it all. A beautiful wife Mi-ri, two children and two dogs, all living in his childhood home that he has bought and renovated. But then one day he is retrenched and it all comes crashing down. As the months of unemployment drag on, his family is forced to cut back on expenses including sending the dogs to stay with the grandparents. He halfheartedly tries his hand at a variety of temporary gigs but is too attached to his status as an executive and his experience in papermaking. When he is humiliated at a job interview at another paper mill, he considers dropping a potted plant on the head of the manager but realizes that there are too many competitors for his position. He therefore places a fake job advertisement to identify his strongest competitors. Then he stalks three of them and armed with the Vietnam War-era gun that used to belong to his father, aims to murder them. He is inept with his first target Beom-mo and accidentally discovers that his target’s wife A-ra is having an affair. In the middle of the mess, Beom-mo ends up being shot dead by his own wife. After that, Man-su becomes more methodical and ruthless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s an absurd premise but fact is often stranger than fiction so this could be made to work. Unfortunately the film takes too long to get going and Park’s attempts to make it funny fall flat for me. For example while stalking the first target, there’s a distracting subplot of Man-su being bitten by a snake only to be saved by A-ra. When Man-su learns of the affair, he even tries to distract from Beom-mo catching the latter’s wife in the act. It’s a pointless waste of time and unfunny. I can venture a guess at what Park was going for here. Despite them being competitors and him intending to kill Beom-mo, Man-su actually sees him as a kindred spirit. After eavesdropping on Beom-mo’s conversations, Man-su uses the same talking points on his own wife. But these shenanigans create too much doubt over whether he’s actually going through with the murder. The obstacle is his way isn’t his guilt but his own incompetence. The film improves once he gets that first kill out of the way and moves at a faster pace. The humorous bits are downplayed as Man-su is shown to be more ruthless and this turns into something that is more in line with Park’s usual work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there were elements of black humor in Park’s previous films, it takes center stage here. I find it difficult to accept that this is meant to be more engaging instead of the horror that Man-su is murdering peers just like him with families of their own. There’s a deep nihilism here in that Man-su’s actions are justified by the circumstances he finds himself. It’s the cold logic of cutthroat competition applied to the individual level, which is why leftists are praising it for its anti-capitalism theme. But this take glosses over reasonable objections advanced in the film by the wives that they could retrain into other jobs even if the pay and status are reduced. They could downsize to more modest housing instead of a mansion with an expansive footprint. In Man-su’s case, Mi-ri takes up her old job as a dental hygienist to help shoulder the financial burden. But all that is unacceptable to Man-su. It’s an assault on his male pride and his status as the patriarch and provider of the family. It’s belittling that his years of experience and deep knowledge of specialty varieties of paper are thrown away. I fail to see how the actions of such a man make him a hero of anticapitalism when he is motivated by his own pride and masculine insecurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s an obvious parallel here to Marty Supreme<\/a><\/em> that we only recently watched. Both are films in which awful people aren’t really punished for their actions. Perhaps it’s a sign of our more cynical times that audiences are lapping them up. I find the moral logic in these films odious and the characters deeply unlikeable. What’s more the weak attempts at humor don’t even make this entertaining enough to make up for the badly thought out theme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Park Chan Wook’s latest is once again filled with murder. Unlike the past crime thrillers that established his reputation however, No Other Choice is a comedy and I think not a good one at all. The comedic timing is off, the film itself is too long and most of all, the main character is so … Continue reading No Other Choice (2025)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82476"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82553,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82476\/revisions\/82553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}