No Other Choice Nails the Joke, Then Keeps Telling It

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At the top of No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a paper industry expert stands in his immaculate garden, cooks a fresh eel on the grill, surveys his enviable house, and corrals his loving family into a brochure-perfect “one-minute hug.” He takes a beat, then sighs dreamily, “You know what I’m feeling now? I’ve got it all.” It’s the kind of moment that feels one “Temptation Sensation” needle-drop away from an It’s Always Sunny in Seoul title card: “The Gang Loses Everything.” The sunlight is too clean, the lawn too manicured. The dramatic irony is tangible to everyone except for the family onscreen: This is not going to last.

By morning, the celebratory gifted eel proves to be the gold-watch kiss-off from Solar Paper, now downsizing at the behest of its American owners. Our paper-loving You Man-Su (an excellent Lee Byung-Hun) suddenly finds himself in a corporate group therapy circle where men chant affirmations (“Losing my job is not my choice! I’ll be born again! In three months I’ll be hired!”) and thwack their foreheads in sync. Soon enough, he’s restocking shelves, nursing a toothache, and swallowing humiliation while his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), trims expenses and returns to work at a dental clinic to try to make ends meet. The house he’s desperate to keep—a reclaimed childhood home built on what was once his father’s pig farm—becomes a mausoleum of debt and pride. Worst of all, they even have to cancel their subscriptions to Netflix (to their son’s ire) and Man-su’s beloved bonsai magazine. Oh, the humanity!

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Even before the eventual violence—this is a Park film, so of course there’s going to be violence—the film is shot with the glee of someone reclaiming their pulp instincts. The colors are garish, the cuts surgical, every frame calibrated for both visual wit and moral discomfort. Few directors can make a midlife crisis amidst an economic collapse feel like slapstick choreography. But when Man-su, still clinging to professional dignity, hears about an opening at a rival firm, he vows to rejoin the workforce by any means necessary—and because this is Park Chan-wook, those means don’t stay figurative for long.

See, it’s not enough to merely “open up” a job (via murder of its holder, naturally); even if a position becomes available, you’re still just one candidate amongst many, a sad fish in a cruel sea. So, Man-su forges a fake company and, not unlike an anglerfish, lures his peers in with phantom job interviews as a means of assessing their candidacy, then vowing to eliminate those with resumes that might surpass his own. Park films these early attempts with bleakly farcical energy: take the rooftop almost-murder where Man-su, poised to drop a planter on a target below, seemingly reconsiders and sets it down, only to grab a bigger planter instead. (The plan is foiled when an elderly neighbor wanders up and asks if he’s “weightlifting.”) It’s played in a bright, plastic register that lets dread bloom in daylight. The satire is broad: self-help as corporate anesthesia, corporate “help” as lethal anesthesia. But the style is utterly Parkian, with rapid inserts, scalpel-precise rhythm, and visual jokes that fire like starter pistols.

After that, the plot moves like a tragicomic machine. Man-su keeps killing his peers for the job he thinks will restore him, and the film keeps doubling down. The best stretch comes midway, with a woodland stakeout that devolves into a snakebite and a panicked wrong field surgery by an actress who definitely knows what she’s doing because she once played a medic, followed by a living-room brawl set to blaring pop. Park is a virtuoso of tone, and for a while, No Other Choice hums with delirious energy: the precision of a thriller and the absurdity of farce. But once the machine reveals itself, its designs become clearer and more repetitive. The first murder is morally nauseous, painfully human, laugh-out-loud bleak, and formally immaculate; the second shortens the setup; the third pushes the gag but not the idea. The film doesn’t deepen its conceit so much as remix it with new props and louder cues, until it feels ritualized.

This ritualism, on some level, is the point. Man-su’s titular mantra reverberates like a corporate prayer, its meaning hollowing out with each repetition. But the same goes for the film itself. Rather than serving as a clever iteration of the old adage about form extending content, the repetition feels indulgent—a prolonging of a joke already told, not the discovery of a new punchline. The satire’s range is wide but its depth shallow: middle-class fatalism, corporate euphemism, the easy savageries of a labor market that calls itself a “family.” Yet those themes can feel, at times, like little more than set pieces. The focus on the capitalist mindset and the brutalizing hypnosis of the rat race is meaningful, yes, but less so when the film rarely reckons with the system itself, much less those it actually leaves behind.

The movie inevitably lives in Parasite’s long shadow—not because Park is chasing Bong Joon-ho’s movie, but because the culture chases the comparison for him. Park himself has tried to clarify the distinction: No Other Choice isn’t about class warfare, he’s said, but class cannibalism—a story of petty, desperate people clinging to a rung and kicking the neighbors’ fingers away. It’s a useful distinction, though not a saving one. That is in large part because, really, the difference between the two films feels less a matter of subject than substance. Parasite sharpens critique into tragedy-laced satire; No Other Choice converts it into parodic pageantry.

But, of course, even when Park runs on a single thesis, he still laps most directors. Every space in No Other Choice feels wired for contradiction—the greenhouse as sanctuary and crime scene; the family home as stage for farce and confession; the paper factory as mausoleum to vanished labor. There’s a cross-cut of terrible elegance in which the wife unearths a backyard grave while, across town, a rich man is Saran-wrapped and Spam-fed to death. Elsewhere, silhouettes outline a tense conversation outside a police station, the camera trained on the ground to show a shadow-puppet rendition of the interaction. A snap of the fingers ushers in a flashback. A moving shot creeps slowly around a home to voyeuristically show what each resident is doing through the windows. A bonfire is overlaid with Man-su’s house, a corpse overlaid with Mi-ri’s sleeping form. The cast, too, is more than up to the task: Byung-hun plays Man-su as if toggling a dimmer—shame to rage to manic cheer—and the slapstick never erases the pathos; it just refuses to underline it. Ye-jin’s Mi-ri gives the film its anchor of ordinary intelligence and quiet will, the emotional core beneath the pulp.

By the finale, No Other Choice reaches its most honest form: a film about people trapped in rituals that keep going because stopping would mean changing. The irony of the film is that there was always another choice—dozens of them, in fact. As multiple wives insist to their husbands throughout the film, the ousted paper experts could always just go work at a cafe or something. Each man responds with an identical monologue: “Paper has fed me for 25 years. It’s how I’m meant to be. I have no other choice.” So the factory drones on, and the joke repeats itself.

Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenplay by: Park Chan-wook, Don McKellar, Lee Kyoung-mi, Lee Ja-hye.
Stars: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won.
Release Date: Oct. 9, 2025 (New York Film Festival); Dec. 25, 2025 (select US theaters)

Casey Epstein-Gross is Assistant Music Editor at Paste. She also writes about film, television, culture, and politics, and her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can be reached on X (@epsteingross) or via email ([email protected]).

NYFF: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice Nails the Joke, Then Keeps Telling It

Park Chan-wook's latest is a viciously funny and beautifully made pulpy corporate satire that can’t stop looping its own punchline.