Critics reviews

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is a shocking, innovative, and darkly comic film about the pressures of life under capitalism. It’s more proof that the Oldboy director is nothing less than a cinematic master.

Park is a master of bad-taste antics and No Other Choice has bravura flourishes aplenty, including some impeccably executed death scenes.

It’s a whole slapstick affair, conducted with Park’s trademark finesse, and taking full advantage of Lee’s comedic skills (he’s a major, established star in Korea, though largely known internationally for his role as the Front Man in Netflix’s Squid Game).

When it comes to Park’s technique, though, unexpected choices abound. Even potentially obligatory-feeling scenes are served with cheeky topspin... It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

Adapting the book into a midnight-dark comedy, virtuoso South Korean director Park Chan-wook nudges the title back towards the polite: No Other Choice. But the implicit violence of lowering a headcount is soon put front and centre. Restructuring has never been so bloody... This being Park, the slapstick also has symphonic brilliance, and sometimes even a mad kind of beauty.

Consistently surprising and engrossing, the drama unfolds with elegant pace and flow, finding sparkling moments of true ingenuity along the way. It is, in myriad ways, a great work of pulp fiction.

Like previous Park films, No Other Choice is a dense and thorny affair, weaving numerous subplots and tonal registers together in a way that strengthens them all. It’s a movie that can be hilarious, depressing, and tense all at once, without shortchanging its dramatic aims even as it left my audience frequently cackling in their seats.

[T]he film paints a caustic picture of South Korean society that could extend to many other countries and cultures, including our own.

“No Other Choice” bluntly depicts a contemporary workforce decimated by AI and cost-cutting, but its view of alienated labor and thwarted masculinity has roots in indelible works such as “Parasite” and “Breaking Bad.” And for all its dark comedy, the movie is most cutting when it moves away from the big set pieces and, instead, examines the small ways that employees lose their humanity to a capitalist system that’s out to destroy them.

No Other Choice maintains a steady exploration of family dynamics, and Chan-wook is able to express this perfectly through his cast.

“No Other Choice” is a brutal story for brutal times, one steeped in corrosive humor and delivered with Park’s customary flair.

“No Other Choice” is a sly slay-fest, with an appropriately mordant ending that, in a wordless image, has much to say about how a maximally efficient company operates while implicitly posing pointed questions about the future of workers who think of our jobs as central to our lives. You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight... But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.