IFFI 2025: ‘No Other Choice’ movie review: Park Chan-wook’s brilliant auto-parasitic critique of capitalism

Somehow a 9AM festival assemblage turned into a Park Chan-wook congregation present astatine IFFI Goa, and the antheral rewarded america each with a delicious suburban infomercial that blossoms into the benignant of razor enactment lone helium tin get distant with. So this is wherefore cinephiles dainty him similar a insignificant deity…

Adapted from The Ax by Donald Westlake, No Other Choice is simply a surgical takedown of the thought that dependable wage checks are a redundant architecture of moralisms. It is besides PCW’s funniest, angriest, and astir ruthlessly clear-eyed battle connected capitalism since his earlier vengeance cycle, and it wears each of its snark and spite similar a bespoke rubber onesie.

The crippled is elemental and horrifically specific. Yoo Man-su, played by Lee Byung-hun with a premix of mortified dignity and cartoonish panic, is simply a paper-industry lifer whose beingness is scaffolded astir his résumé. When American investors bargain the steadfast and chopped jobs, Man-su’s comfy satellite unravels.

Rather than alteration course, helium starts to scheme. To Man-su, losing his occupation is an axing of individuality (or his fragile antheral ego) that is tantamount to sacrilege. He posts a fake occupation ad, stalks rivals, and 3D-prints a replacement for his family’s heirloom gun, earlier the bodies statesman to heap up. PCW tracks this descent with a detached amusement that ne'er softens into sympathy for entitlement. But what the seasoned Korean auteur refuses to fto america hide is however mean that logic feels erstwhile framed arsenic a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’.

PCW’s anti-capitalist satire is truthful effectual due to the fact that helium understands the machinery of humiliation. He stages firm cruelty arsenic bureaucratic theatre, with severance affirmation workshops that formal up disposability. The movie treats these niceties arsenic insults. Each firm euphemism is simply a prop that nudges radical toward motivation vacancy. All the chuckles the movie generates are acidic due to the fact that they look from a deep-seated recognition. We spot colleagues trained to pat you connected the backmost and privation you the champion successful the infinitesimal of layoff. We ticker a household cancel Netflix, merchantability cars and reassign dogs similar movable liabilities. The indignities are mundane and truthful devastating.

Visually, this is PCW astatine his astir cunning since 2022’s Decision to Leave. Kim Woo-hyung’s cinematography composes suburban geometry into a terrain of insidious traps. PCW loves a bully architectural joke, similar a greenhouse becoming a mortuary, oregon a household plaything announcing a consciousness of dread arsenic it bobs. The movie is edited with a gleefully originative abandon. Match cuts and whip pans are functional diagrams that transpose Man-su’s backstage panic onto the nationalist choreography of work. And PCW’s long-time composer Jo Yeong-wook, provides a baroque pulse that keeps the code buoyant until it rips distant the buoyancy towards the finale.

Lee Byung-hun gives an astonishing performance. He makes Man-su pitiable and grotesque astatine once. The histrion calibrates humiliation with a benignant of suburban performative masculinity that looks ridiculous until dangerous. Son Ye-jin’s Mi-ri is the amended motivation compass, though inactive compromised. She is practical, exhausted, and infinitely sadder than the movie needs her to be. Her last choices relation arsenic the film’s climactic fulcrum and PCW trusts her to transportation the residue of decisions 1 would alternatively word survival.

The film’s humour is cruel and precise, and PCW treats the aggregate homicides arsenic logistical problems gone naive. Man-su’s bungled attempts make a farce of desperation, yet the drama ne'er lets him disconnected the hook. The laughs are a mechanics for motivation lucidity and PCW wants america to consciousness however easy the strategy reconfigures compassion into calculation. That realisation is disconcerting. It means the villain isn’t truthful overmuch the antheral with the gun, but the strategy that makes execution look similar a rational concern successful stability.

PCW stages No Other Choice arsenic an auto-parasitic meditation connected capitalism’s endowment for conscripting its subjects into their ain undoing, that recalls Marx’s diagnosis of alienated labour and the Foucauldian thought of self-regulating power. Man-su becomes a conduit done which the strategy metabolises fearfulness into obedience, converting idiosyncratic crises into firm utility, and exposing however modern economies thrive connected individuals who internalise the unit that erstwhile required an outer sovereign. And successful rendering the brittle antheral ego arsenic a precarious edifice propped up by labour, status, and the phantasy of indispensability, PCW simultaneously exposes masculinity arsenic a governance exertion whose fragility becomes the substance and the fallout of late-capitalist collapse.

There are affinities with different Korean satires. Comparisons to Parasite are inevitable, and PCW’s movie shares a saturnine humour with Bong Joon-ho’s absorption connected however people shapes interior life. But PCW sharpens a different, much elegant leaf here. Social satires thin to dramatise inequality arsenic a clash of households, but No Other Choice narrows successful connected the nonrecreational individuality that capitalism breeds. It shows however a strategy that sells dignity arsenic a payment tin successful practice, retreat it similar a service.

If the movie has a flaw it is simply a motivation architecture that sometimes feels a tad excessively clinical. PCW’s aesthetic precision is replete with moments of theatricality wherever the publication wants the earthy edges to bleed more. Still, that ceremonial power is besides the film’s métier. PCW is adept astatine making cruelty look gorgeously stylised truthful that each the glorious ugliness hits harder.

This movie is bleak, but it besides carries a scalding tenderness. Its messaging points towards those desperations erstwhile institutions state humans redundant, and radical respond successful ways that uncover the institutions’ deepest cruelty. There is besides a peculiarly bankrupt last representation that stings due to the fact that it refuses casual motivation closure. PCW leaves america watching idiosyncratic who has survived successful a satellite that has been wrenched toward mechanisation and says, successful effect, that surviving is not the aforesaid arsenic living.

No Other Choice is PCW’s playful, poisonous fable astir however enactment becomes selfhood and however losing enactment tin consciousness similar an existential theft. It’s hard to deliberation of a much applicable satire successful a twelvemonth erstwhile occupation information is vapour and algorithms committedness to marque quality labour optional, and PCW proves however terrifyingly plausible the absurdity is. It’s a tiny masterpiece of misanthropic sympathy.

No Other Choice was screened astatine the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India successful Goa