Park Chan-wook's NO OTHER CHOICE (2025)

And this is why I don't FaceTime anymore....

Oh... so, Park Chan-Wook saw the scene where everyone is rushing in a mad frenzy to get that cell phone in his buddy Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite and thought: "ok, sure, but how about this unfolds with a gun and a ridiculously loud 80s needle drop while an overwrought infidelity drama plays out?"

No Other Choice is a snappily edited and meticulously shot film-noir (if one could call it that) where the central character - and really a majority of the characters around him - reeks of equal parts if ineptitude and bouts of extreme violence that it ranks with the nastiest comedies made this century (like think of how dark the Coens get and realize this is like that but the plucky anti-hero/really-a-villain has a maior toothache). What makes the film so spectacular is a confluence of immensely pleasurable characterization via Lee Byung-Hun who sees himself as "unemployed" (because heaven forbid he get a job outside the prestigious world of.... paper) and Park Chanwook's air-tight script and direction.

There is such pleasure really and continuous, gut-busting laughter to be had because of just how awful this man is, how his plan to bump off who he sees as "competition" for a job for a Paper company is seemingly so implausible and yet so much of the film is him discovering that the men he means to go and take out are themselves total messes of meat-shaped humans. 

The precision in the filmmaking is also joyful, though that is not necessarily a surprise given how Park has only grown more daring and brazen with his transition-edits from not only one scene to the next or through time but between images of people talking on phones and having odd bodily functions and what might be dug up on that back-yard at such and such a moment. It is the easiest crutch to say something is Hitchcockian, but this is exactly that only bolder and weirder in the contours of immense control of the frame and music - and it is in the performances that Park let's his actors rip.

The centerpiece of the film for me is when You Man-Su and Gu-Bummo (sic) have their confrontation in his music room with the volume cranked so high that not only their dialog but then Gu's even angrier wife coming in to confront him makes the high music and the violence that ensues so unhinged and delightful that is is hard to contain oneself watching it.

 There are many sequences like this in the film where one can sense Park, if not in the shooting (it must have been so taut to conduct it on set) then at least at the script level or in editing, with a giant grin ear to ear at what he was seeing. Furthermore is this uncanny relationship between husband and wife You and Lee (the brilliant Son Ri-Jin) who can see right through her husband while also being as jealous about him as he is for her (after all, what could he really be doing going on these... job interviews?!)

It really is remarkable in No Other Choice just how the characters are all titled at a certain level and angle and it could be no other way indeed because of the level of satirical wildness. I know the instinct will be for some to compare it to Parasite because of the connection not just for the filmmakers but for the class warfare on display. But where that was ultimately more sad and realistic when you peel away the layers of absurdism, this is just goofy and all the better for it. It is a cracked-mirror reflection that is not just one or two cracks but like a whole dozen shards that get in your face and then it is just funny to see how someone peels away those cracks out of the skin.

In other words, No Other Choice understands that the world of unfettered greed and late-era Capitalism is best dealth with in stories and direction like this where it is based in literal cut-throat (or really gun-splattered) mayhem and where even the side characters are greedy and nasty little people and the cops are not dumb but certainly incompetent and the children are also flawed and talented in their respective ways (at doing dumb crime and uh playing the Cello respectively). 

At the same time it is a film packed with terrific visual metaphors and even suspense within those points (all of those logs on those trucks).  It is the first one of Park's films in over ten years - and I liked Handmaiden and Decision to Leave - that I can't wait to watch again.