London Film Festival 2025 – No Other Choice ★★★★★

Released: TBC (London Film Festival)

Director: Park Chan-Wook

Starring: Lee Byung-Hun

Most of the modern world exists either as victims or perpetrators of late stage capitalism. With Park Chan-Wook’s Magnum Opus, No Other Choice, that line between prognosticator and sufferer is slowly, viscously collapsed. With some of the most inventive imagery and editing of this decade, Park expertly crafts a fable surrounding the exploitation of communal grief.  

As a factor floor manager for an evolving paper company, Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-Hun) is let go in the face of changing times. The inhumanity of his firing sends Man-soo down a slippery slope that sees him trying to create new opportunities and openings, all the while trying to violently climb the applicant ladder, within his increasingly shrinking circle of paper artistes.  

No Other Choice feels like Park’s most mature film. You won’t find any twists, or a constant barrage of brutality here. Instead a measured, tonally assured tragedy, not just in its central characters, but in its peripheral people too. Yoo Man-soo’s descent into manipulative and pre-meditated violence positions him in a financial position that is akin to his fellow unemployed drifters, but also as the people that fired him. The dramatic irony that we grasp such a dichotomy and he does not, provides a growing sense of discomfort, as well as an empathetic provocation to us: how far will we go along with Yoo Man-Soo, and why should we? There are no easy answers, only the void that the film and its eventual catharsis leaves behind.  

Yoo Man-Soo’s recurring hobby throughout the film is in maintaining his greenhouse and family garden, particularly interested in the preservation and growth of bonsai trees. The natural world no longer posses any agency, but rather exists in service of both the petty and tragic consequences of Salarymen. Yet here lies the fundamental split within him; he looks after and grows the very thing his entire career has been centered around destroying, kept upright by coiling copper, desperate to make the planted seeds grow into a tree incapable of being consumed. Yoo Man-soo sees his conquest as a war, one he’s fighting on his family behalf’s, a war that nature has already lost, and Yoo is too focused on his goal to see the Forrest through the trees. The emasculation that he suffers extends to a history with alcoholism and violence that has laid dormant in him for so long, which positions his arc as less a loss of self, and more a re-imagining of the self, forcing himself to evolve to the changing times while trying to keep the material and natural parts of his world intact, protected from change. But he is also not alone in that emasculation, the unemployed of his industry face much greater emotional and physical pain than he does, but in the effort to keep what he has, positions himself as the person best suited to create a job market that’s catered to him.  

On a formal note, Park’s camera and transition choices are audiovisual flourishes the likes of which I’ve never really seen. Similar to The Handmaiden, and less like I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay, these magic tricks serve as a continuously disillusioned perspective, while also providing reprieves in diving into the reforms and collapses of the community around him.  

At the start of No Other Choice, barbecuing eel for his family, Yoo Man-Soo, looks up at one of his planted trees, and proclaims “Come on, fall”, asking for the blossoms to drop and the cycle for renewal to begin again. But he’s also somewhat asking for his own fall; simultaneously desperate to leave the career that has become his life, to abandon the company that has owned him since high school graduation, but also can’t separate himself from the notion of what he has achieved. By the end, that dichotomy is flipped, and Yoo is happier for it, even if we recognize just how far he’s fallen. Park can’t help but keep reinventing the way cinema should look and sound, and how stories should be told, and so has crafted what for me is his best film. He has crafted some of the most horrifying images of this century, and yet, with No Other Choice, Park immortalizes what just might be his most insidious image to date. There is no one doing it like Park Chan-Wook.