City Cinema: No Other Choice

Dark Comedy/Thriller. 14A, violence, disturbing content, coarse language.
Dir: Park Chan-wook, South Korea, 2025, 139 min.
Lee Bryong-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Woo Seung Kim.
In Korean with English subtitles.

Nominated for three Golden Globes including Best Picture and Best Actor, Winner TIFF International People’s Choice Award

“If the slapstick humor of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times developed a sense of bloodlust alongside its overwhelming empathy, it would look a whole lot like Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. The fallout of an untimely layoff for a long-tenured paper worker provides the premise of a pitch-black comedy… Rather than beat his competition in a tough job market, Man-su decides to eliminate them. He goes from getting the axe to wielding one… along with a gun and any number of other creative weapons… When the head honchos of giant corporations offer nothing but platitudes that there is ‘no other choice’ but to sacrifice their laborers at the altar of profits, it only makes sense that workers would eventually apply that ruthless market logic of scarcity to each other… Park expertly fuses genres, navigating deftly between broad satire and taut thriller… A hearty helping of gallows humor delivered with a marvelously mordant twist by the talented acting ensemble also cuts across both modes of filmmaking… Its centerpiece kill sequences feature some of Park’s most dazzling technical filmmaking spectacles yet… [Based on] Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax.” —Marshall Shaffer, The Playlist