[FILM REVIEW] No Other Choice (2025)

Imagine working at a company for so long, only to one day be made redundant. What would you do? For some, it’s taking the perfect opportunity to step back and take a well-deserved break. For others, it might be going straight into upgrading their skill sets. Well, in Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, the main character, Yoo Man-soo, goes to great lengths to ensure that he gets re-hired after getting laid off. 

Played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun, Man-soo works at Solar Paper as a paper industry expert with over 25 years of experience, and lives in a beautiful home with his wife, Lee Mi-ri (Crash Landing on You’s Son Ye-jin), their two children, and two golden retrievers. One day, his idyllic world came crashing down when he was informed that he had been let go from Solar Paper, in a move that the company’s new American bosses would claim they had “no other choice” but to enforce. 

Now faced with a changed and uncertain future, Mi-ri decides to make adjustments to their lifestyle, like cutting back on their Netflix subscription and even giving away their golden retrievers to her parents. She’s even gotten a job at the dental office assisting a rather handsome dentist, much to her husband’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Man–soo attends a corporate mindfulness programme to help him cope with the job loss, but it seems to amplify his fears of not being employed even more, especially with his self-enforced deadline of three months—the period when his severance runs out. That is, until he hears about an opening in a rival paper company, Moon Paper. Of course, things don’t always go the way you’d want them to, and the same goes for Man-soo, whose competition consists of candidates better suited as well as AI-powered machinery.

Man-soo gets the idea of targeting other candidates by posing as a fake paper company looking to hire. To avoid leaving a traceable digital trail, he insists that applicants submit paper résumés, arguing that a paper company should use paper whenever possible. Once he has received the applicants’ information, Man-soo intends to murder them one by one. This creates a string of job vacancies among those who are employed, and reduces competition from the unemployed. And you think your office politics were horrible.

It’s hard not to root for Man-soo as he stumbles through his murder plans while trying to keep them hidden from his family. Lee Byung-hun convincingly portrays a family man who feels he has no choice but to resort to extreme measures to protect his family’s well-being and reclaim his pride as a breadwinner. 

And because this is a black-comedy, hijinks naturally ensue: Man-soo suspects the dentist, his wife’s boss, has a thing for her; his son ends up being accused of stealing mobile phones from a neighbour’s shop; and on top of it all, the mortgage on his house, which we find out is his childhood home, has been defaulted on. All that, and coupled with director Park Chan-wook’s distinctive flair for storytelling (see: The Handmaiden and Oldboy), one is always wondering what Man-soo’s next move would be.

Mirroring the book that inspired it, The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, No Other Choice offers a sharp, satirical look at the ruthless competitiveness of corporate life and the grim reality of redundancies.

Now showing in Golden Village.

Running time: 139 minutes
The Seoul Story’s rating: 4.5/5

Written by: Atiqah Rosle
Photos by: Purple Plan SG

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