Writers: Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee and Don McKeller
Director: Park Chan-wook
What would you do to get ahead? Driven to desperate measures, what might you be capable of? Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 takes place in the competitive world of paper manufacturing in Korea, examining the facelessness of corporate strategy that lays off workers and leaves them with nothing but years of misplaced loyalty. A study of people pushed to extremes and feeling left with No Other Choice, Park’s film is tonally a little fluid – the consequences of having four screenwriters in Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, Don McKeller and a 139-minute running time, but revels in its depiction of the sour side of human nature.
Laid off after 25-years when an American firm buys his company, Yoo Man-soo cannot get another job in the paper industry and is left to admire rival and YouTube star before coming up with a plan that will clear his path of his rivals and get Man-soo back to work. But with a family to support and a wife who starts to suspect, her husband’s obsessions comes between them, but will he risk everything to succeed?
There are plenty of excellent reference point for Park’s movie not least Robert Hamer’s 1940s drama Kind Hearts and Coronets in which ambitious individuals must find ingenious ways to stymie the competition. Here, No Other Choice finds several, spending the majority of the film on Min-soo’s first problem who he must stalk over several days as well as a number of failed attempts. It’s a good character journey though, a man driven to desperate acts with no idea what he is doing and it is entertaining watching him ineptly stumble through something he assumed will be easier. Grasping the nettle, the Director and the character then move a bit faster with the next two and, for crime genre fans, with a bit more inventiveness.
Lee Byung-hun’s central performance treads the line nicely between complex desperation, pride and enjoying some of the power that his plan gives him, a determination to find his way back even when beset by fresh problems at home. And although it is a small role, he is well supported by Son Ye-jin as his wife Mi-ri whose loving support changes to a wary concern and later to a confederacy that her spouse never recognises and Son is particularly effective at conveying a great deal with few words.
No Other Choice is largely satirical, but it does also delve into family drama, although at a shallow level, giving Min-soo a beloved childhood home that he recently repurchased, two children including a stepson, a problem with alcohol and a range of marital incidents with his wife, such as the stepson’s criminal behaviour and his wife’s possible affair. There is more to unpack than the film can managed even in its bumper running time, but there is enough of a sense that this man has a lot to lose even if the film goes on too many digressions
No Other Choice is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
