Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has it made: we know he has it made the moment we first see him, barbequing eel outside his spacious home whilst wearing a contented smile and a ‘happy at my level of maturity’ moustache. Not only that, but the eel was sent as a gift by his impressed new bosses at Solar Paper, the company where he has slaved and spent his best years. How pleasant to be appreciated; thing is, the gift turns out to be a sop, thrown his way ahead of a brutal round of restructuring in which Man-su loses his precious job. And it is precious to him: it’s his way to find meaning, secure the good opinion of others, keep a roof over his family’s heads and stave off debt. Early in the film he’s cast, along with a number of others, into a flimsy kind of self-help workshop where weeping men are encouraged to deal with their run of bad fortune with equanimity. Spoiler: none of them really can.
Suddenly, doting wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), who at first comes across as a bit of an Act One Nora Helmer, is the one who intrinsically understands the sacrifices they will need to make, as a family, to keep from foreclosure. Man-su turns out to be a less practical thinker; torn between shame and the hell of abortive job interviews in a surprisingly crowded recruitment pool, his only moment of clarity relates to how he will likely never get ahead, not with all these talented co-applicants there before him. As he begins wasting money to find ways to make money, one thing becomes clear: his best bet is to remove the competition.
Oldboy (2003) this ain’t and Lee Byung-hun, probably best known to the likes of us from his unsparing roles in A Bittersweet Life (2005) and I Saw The Devil (2010), isn’t a natural to the world of surveillance and elimination. In fact, the first part of the film sees him flailing around in his newly-chosen capacity as a hitman, pratfalling with the best of them (this is, in many places, a deeply funny film). One of his main problems, aside from his lack of acuity, is that he immediately comes to like the men he is targeting; you get the distinct sense that Man-su may have been lonely even whilst riding high at Solar Paper, and that he’s definitely lonely now, smiling along as he overhears rival Bummo (Lee Sung-min) and his wife Ara (Yeom Hye-ran) reminisce over their courtship and early lives. The film plays with ideas of doubling in places, and this feels prominent whenever Man-su gets really close to a rival. In another set of circumstances, perhaps they could be friends. He almost forgets why he’s there, and when he remembers, he makes a hash of it.
However, as his desperation grows, so does his cruelty. Not for him, come the end, the deeply misguided idea of dropping a heavy plant pot onto a man and hoping for the best. He gets far more comfortable with the kinds of early-days Park Chan-wook cruelty which we may expect, albeit that the director’s work has grown more and more morally opaque over the years, with No Other Choice perhaps the most morally opaque of them all. You do not come out of this film feeling that lessons have been learned; if anything, lessons have been dodged via a sequence of extraordinary coincidences and events, which rescind the Happily Ever After that they at first suggest.
It’s very fitting that all of this happens to a paper mill technician, now fighting for dominance over other paper mill technicians (of varying levels of specialty and seniority) in a century where, more and more often, we are told to expect to live in a paperless society. South Korea, one of the most hi-tech nations on the planet, can still sustain numerous paper mills, at least up to the point in time in which this film, and I’m sorry, unfolds. Paper has endured for hundreds of years, but it’s also a fragile substance, flammable, easy to damage and easy to throw away, just like its handlers. Paper also offers a pushback against an increasingly ephemeral online world and yet, given all the layoffs (the film is based on a book, The Ax, which refers to the American English idiom ‘getting axed’) the business is in a precarious state. As much as wives plead with their husbands to retrain, to try something else, the level of specialist knowledge they have built up over decades of hard graft won’t die; they can’t just set it aside, and they’d rather drink themselves stupid than lose face in an inferior trade (this would be a very tranquil short film, if we got the version where Man-su stuck with his new job in the warehouse and Miri helped him to save some cash).
As much as No Other Choice toys with how possible choice could actually be, it creates an often largely sympathetic portrayal of people we would recognise: always one pay cheque away from losing the lot, hamstrung by ideas of status and success and caught in nonsensical materialist contests with the neighbours. Old habits die hard here, right to the end scenes. If it all makes us laugh then yeah, perhaps we ought to laugh; South Korea has excelled lately in ridiculing the precarious nature of late stage capitalism, even if No Other Choice largely avoids the Grand Guignol stylings of Squid Game, even whilst working away at a similar point (though also briefly throws in a few larger-than-life Americans to cause problems). Perhaps the most galling aspect of this film, for me, is in how Man-su gradually loses his voice in order to gain what he wants, in a kind of grim Hans Christian Andersen story reworked to point to the alienation inherent in the modern, AI-assisted workplace. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ seems to be the only clear lesson in an otherwise murky, often hilarious, often horrifying piece of narrative film where you end up risking everything to gain back a fraction of what you had. In its way, with or without anything like the clawhammer sequence in Oldboy (well, okay, one tooth needs to be pulled), No Other Choice has some bitter, discomfiting sequences, and its slow slide from farce to fierce works very well indeed.
No Other Choice (2026) is on general release now.