Paper Cuts: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice

It was a hammer that brought Park Chan-wook international fame. The three-minute hallway battle in Oldboy (2003), in which its hammer-wielding protagonist fights off gang members in a gloomy corridor, has become one of the most notorious scenes in contemporary cinema. The film became a cult success; Park, a global name. It was also that hammer which led Park to explore, in his words, more “enriched” and “sophisticated” horizons. Alarmed by the number of men who asked him to autograph their hammers—first hammer as tragedy, then hammer as farce—the filmmaker began to make films with women protagonists: his follow-up to Oldboy and final installment in his “revenge” trilogy, Lady Vengeance (2005); The Handmaiden (2016); and two English-language projects in Stoker (2013) and the television series The Little Drummer Girl (2018). If the success of Oldboy established Park as a chronicler of lurid vengeance and violence, his work since—which has ranged from quirky romance to detective noir to gothic horror—has proved his range. The hammer bore great fruit. 

No Other Choice (2025) was twenty long years in the making, with progress stalling while Park sought sufficient funds. (He had originally planned to set the film in America—the “heart of capitalism”—but turned to Korea after being rejected by Hollywood studios.) It may seem like a return to first principles, not least due to the title of the 1997 novel from which it was adapted, which name-checks another DIY tool that can double as an instrument of great violence: Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax. The film, which follows a former paper-mill manager who resorts to extreme measures after he gets made redundant, echoes many themes of Park’s early work: the bitter recriminations between men; the allure of violence; the notion that life is a lonely, brutal battle. “Our family is in a war,” the protagonist Man-su warns his son. (The actor who plays Man-su, Lee Byung-hun, is another callback to Park’s past; they last worked together in Park’s first major film, Joint Security Area [2000].) At war against whom? Man-su doesn’t say, but Park’s previous films offer a clue. His work is filled with protagonists who have a habit of seeking salvation in the things that ultimately lead to their destruction—as someone warns Oldboy’s protagonist: “Vengeance is healthy, but what happens if you fulfill it?” Man-su, like so many others before him, is ultimately at war with himself.

Not that any of this is apparent to begin with. It is the tail-end of summer. Shafts of sunlight spill onto a large garden that looks surreal in its glowy, vibrant verdancy, where Man-su’s wife and children are gathered for dinner. In a scene that is ripe with Freudian tension, the man of the house is standing at the barbecue, sizzling strips of eel gifted from the new American owners of the paper company where he works. The meal is associated in Korea with male sexual vigour, as noted by his delighted wife Miri (Son Ye-jin). Later, at the factory, he tries to confront the Americans about their plans for redundancies. They ignore him, and as one escapes into a car, we hear the first of several nods to the film’s title: “I’m sorry,” he tells Man-su, “There’s no other choice.” As the Americans speed away, his colleague looks at a deflated Man-su and asks him whether he received his parting gift: “You got the eel?” The terrible truth dawns on Man-su: The object that had earlier been celebrated as a harbinger of his virility has now become a sign of his undoing. 

When Man-su rails against the layoffs to his colleagues, he likens the act of being fired to having one’s head cut off. It echoes an unpleasant belief, widespread in our time, that our personhood is reducible to the things we do to make money; that we are nothing without our jobs. Man-su’s metaphor is extended through the film—and, at one point, made quite literal. As summer shifts to fall, and the hyperreal saturated yellows and greens of that fateful barbecue are replaced by the muted colors of fallen leaves, Man-su grows bitter and broken, losing all the trappings that had previously burnished his identity as a successful middle-class family man. As the family’s savings dwindle, their two golden retrievers are sent to live with his wife’s parents; his wife takes a part-time job at a clinic run by an irritatingly handsome younger male dentist; and they trade in their gleaming seven-seater SUV for a smaller, rustier model. To risk losing one’s wife, dogs, and car: What more can a man take! The final straw comes when Miri arranges for their home to be sold, and a couple arrives to scope it out with a perky realtor. The European-style house (an aspirational design that nods, Park has said, to “the greed of the Korean middle class”) was previously the site of Man-su’s father’s pig farm; Man-su bought the land, and built the house himself. He will not be turned out of his own creation, not least by a boorish lout who walks around the place as if it were already his, declaring his desire to convert it into a golf course.

Park’s films are often discussed through the lens of their violence and their indelible, disturbing imagery: a man tearing into a live octopus in Oldboy, as its tentacles flail about in doomed protest; another man’s legs being slit in a lake in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the crimson efflorescence of his blood swirling through aquamarine waters. Yet Park’s films can also be funny, most clearly so in No Other Choice. Yes, the film has its chainsaws, as well as another unhappy union between a pair of pliers and some teeth (Oldboy fans will remember). But the whole setup is darkly comic. Man-su’s grand plan to exact his revenge against the humiliations and ravages of faceless corporate capitalism is essentially to reaffirm its logic: He stages a job search of his own, complete with ranked CVs and cover letters. For Freud, compulsive repetition was a sign of grief, an inability to move past one’s trauma; for Mark Fisher, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For Man-su, it’s not that deep; he just wants to bring his dogs home.

Masculinity, that ideal which shrouds itself in such self-seriousness, is ripe for satire, and we see the vain delusions and vulnerabilities of men mercilessly skewered in No Other Choice. They moan about their wives in front of campfires, talk shop with fellow suits in sparkling offices, and eye up the competition at stylish whiskey bars. Bedrooms and dance floors become sites of humiliating cuckoldry, while the pages of a trade magazine dedicated to paper production are dissected with intense fervor. The magazine is called Pulp Men (of course), and the other “pulp men” in Man-su’s orbit are also victims of their pride. One chooses to waste away in stubborn fidelity to a dying industry rather than listen to his exasperated wife’s suggestions to take up hospitality jobs. (“I’m an engineer!” he insists.) Another enjoys a picture-perfect life of rugged individualism on Instagram, which masks his real-life loneliness; his wife refuses to move into his new rural home because she is scared of snakes. Man-su invokes the traumatic life of his late father, who fought in the Vietnam War, to justify his own present-day “war.” At first, I thought the comparison absurd: Fighting for one’s life on a battlefield is very different from clinging desperately to a middle-class lifestyle. But then again, hyper-capitalism can be brutal and distorting. In a culture that prizes success over everything, and sees people only in terms of their potential economic value, you can see why someone would regard a person with a better CV as an enemy combatant, and why they would equate a loss of status with literal death.

I only picked up many of these details on a second watch. Park is a consummate puzzlemaster, rigorously storyboarding his films from beginning to end; no detail is left to chance. Like many of his other films, No Other Choice benefits from multiple watches, suffused as it is with recurrent motifs and small clues. Lines of casual dialogue that seem innocuous at first are in hindsight imbued with sly warnings of what’s to come (the many layers, say, of the word “pigheadedness”). In his previous film, the romantic noir Decision to Leave (2022), Park wove an intricate mystery that revealed hidden depths over multiple viewings. While in No Other Choice there’s no grand “mystery” per se—we are let into Man-su’s plans from the very beginning—the intrigue of the film’s side plots comes into greater focus on rewatch. We might note the rakish shiftiness of the rival for Man-su’s house. We might also question the integrity of an allegedly aggrieved widow. Then there are the literal layers of the labyrinthine family home. While Man-su’s ground-level greenhouse and the garden become host to base secrets, if you ascend upwards, you reach the rooftop balcony and the room where his young daughter Ri-one likes to play her cello. Humanity is, in fact, capable of producing transcendent beauty that brings us closer to the gods—but in this house, such wondrous art is only made possible by some pretty shady subterranean dealings. 

Park’s intensive storyboarding is also evident in the rich imagery of the film, which lands with his trademark deliberateness, and has many ways of getting inside our heads. The surrealism of Decision to Leave is picked up here in a series of intriguing cross-fades (an image of a woman lying ill at ease in bed, superimposed over an image of a graveyard); dream sequences that play with scale; and trippy point-of-view shots from the bottom of a shot glass and a throbbing viscous mouth. Kim Woo-hyung’s cinematography also playfully indulges in Man-su’s love for botany. Nature in the film looks brilliant and foreboding—it is full of secrets. There’s the lush plant life in Man-su’s greenhouse; a roiling sea bashing against the rocks on the shore, and an apple tree that becomes a symbol of a very modern take on original sin. The film shuttles from the end of summer to a fertile fall, emerging on the other side to hear, on a wet and bleak day, a radio program heralding the coming of winter. Growing season is over; will the family reap what Man-su has so determinedly sown?

With its interest in artificial intelligence and modern masculinity, the film speaks to many anxieties of the current moment, though Park also elaborates on nearly three decades of fascination with the twisted vagaries of human folly and fate. Observing the innumerable autumnal leaves scattered across many scenes of No Other Choice, I thought about how nature is as recurrent a theme in the director’s work as those of violence or revenge. Across his films, bodies float along lakes, slip off mountains, and are disposed of in seas and on beaches (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Thirst [2009], Decision to Leave). Love affairs are born underneath magnificent trees (The Handmaiden); salvation fruitlessly reached for in the snow (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance). The exalted majesties of nature, immovable and impervious to the trifling grievances of humans, act as a foil to the human drama of Park’s stories, which often feature characters determined to exact a plot upon the world—whether for revenge or self-enrichment, or simply to get to the bottom of a mystery. They tend to be as meticulous as schemers as he is as a filmmaker, but, unlike him, they are tragically undone by their efforts. Witnessing this contrast between the awesomeness of nature and the pettiness of humankind can be humbling. No matter the high-minded trappings of civilization—the pretentious appreciation of whiskey here, and the masterful songs emanating from the cello. No matter our grand designs. We are still animals (pig-headed ones, some may say): creatures of the natural world, destined to return to the earth.