No Other Choice

Many people have been eager to anoint No Other Choice as “the new Parasite,” but that comparison misses something crucial. Bong Joon-ho’s comedy-thriller arrived on one side of a recent historical fault line; Park Chan-wook’s lands on the other, after a global pandemic, the artificial intelligence gold rush and a run of crises that no longer feel exceptional. The moral neatness of Parasite has been replaced by something timelier, albeit more banal and more frightening: the sense that we are already obsolete.

Park, adapting Donald E Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, filters that dread through something as stubbornly analogue as it gets: paper. For Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged father of two and archetypal “self-made man,” paper isn’t just a job, it’s a cosmology – his Roman Empire, the thing he can’t stop thinking about. He works at a paper production company, a pulp mill where the machines never stop, until, inevitably, the humans are deemed a luxury the firm can no longer afford. Automation and “efficiencies” roll in; his dismissal feels less like a twist than a foregone conclusion.

From there Park zeroes in on a small but horrible question anyone who has ever applied for a job has quietly asked: What is my number? At how many applicants do I still believe I have a chance – ten, 50, 100? In No Other Choice, Yoo’s desperation and wounded pride curdle into a plan that’s both ingenious and monstrous. He creates a fake paper company, announces a recruitment drive that, naturally, only accepts paper applications, and lets the stack of CVs become his private database – and his kill list.

As he stalks his would-be competitors, Park sketches a subculture of men who, like Yoo, have built their identities around this vanishing craft, often over generations. Paper’s quiet versatility once anchored their sense of value. Now that cash disappears into contactless payments and cigarettes into vape pens, that value has evaporated into the humiliation of pleading with algorithms and former subordinates to notice them.

If this were simply a film about a man cracking under economic pressure, it would still be potent. But Park is doing something more acidic. The “Pulp Man of the Year” award, a kind of Oscars for paper men, runs through the comedy-thriller as both a joke and a mirror. Everyone treats it as sacred, using it to measure their worth. Park keeps chipping away at the fact that trophies like this once functioned as shorthand for security. Win one and you were, in theory, employable for life. But that contract has collapsed. In a gigged-out industry, an Oscar doesn’t guarantee work any more than “Pulp Man of the Year” guarantees a steady paycheck; all it proves is that you were briefly useful to a system that will still spit you out the moment it can.

In one caustic sense, Yoo’s plan is a rejection of what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls the “Age of De-Skilling .” It’s a worry that goes back at least to Socrates’ myth of the god Thoth offering writing to King Thamus, who fears that putting words on papyrus will hollow out memory. By that logic, paper was already the first “dangerous” technology, which makes it perversely apt that Park, adapting an American novel about a downsized paper man, leans into the medium’s own original sin. And it’s no coincidence this comes from a director who started out as a film critic, a profession being quietly de-skilled as staff posts vanish and everyone with a feed takes it upon themselves to supply takes for free.

Park has always been a meticulous stylist, and here the form mirrors the craft of his characters. The cinematography and editing have an almost artisanal neatness: crisp compositions, tactile textures, a cleanliness that feels very “paper man”. Shots glimpsed through beer glasses and glasshouses subtly warp perspective, turning everyday spaces into distorted little dioramas. Park and his editor are playful with localised dissolves and superimpositions, images bleeding into one another like ink on damp stock.

Sound design pulls its weight too. A simple shop-door chime, a cheerful little ding announcing someone entering or leaving, becomes one of the film’s most effective devices. Stretched, repeated and left hanging when someone lingers in the doorway, it turns a banal noise into a source of stress, a tiny, maddening metronome.

For all its darkness, No Other Choice is a comedy. Park leans into Yoo’s increasingly elaborate schemes and the grotesque creativity with which he surveils, sabotages and punishes his “competition”. He keeps inviting us to laugh, then forcing us to confront what, exactly, we’re laughing at: not just one man’s breakdown, but the ridiculous rituals we’ve built around work, prestige and dignity in late-stage capitalism.

If the film falters, it’s in the second half, where the pacing starts to fray. The first hour is so tightly wound and so gleefully outrageous that it threatens to peak too early. Once the premise is fully established, not every escalation clears the bar; some stretches feel like variations on a theme we already understand, and the momentum dips just when you want the screws turned even tighter.

Even so, No Other Choice lands as a sharp, unsettling entry in Park’s filmography: less operatically violent than some of his earlier work, but no less cruel in its implications. The fear of shame that comes with unemployment and poverty is here overshadowed by something more pitiful – the humiliation of being reduced to a line in an application count, a replaceable unit in a system that doesn’t even bother to look you in the eye while it discards you. In that sense, Park isn’t just chronicling the age of de-skilling; he’s mocking the entire machinery that dares to call it progress.

Reviewed on: 11 Dec 2025