The great Korean auteur Park Chan-wook has produced several masterpieces over his three-decade career, but none so urgently of-the-moment as No Other Choice, his  black comedy thriller.

Park says he held onto No Other Choice through decades because he believed its premise — absurd, tragic, painfully universal — had the potential to become a “defining work.”

“Whenever I told people about the story, no matter the time period or country, they would always say how relatable it was,” he recalls. But the year 2025 might just be the perfect moment for No Other Choice to meet a suitably anxious and economically pressed worldwide public.

Deploying his baroque visual inventiveness, Park highlights the tragicomic absurdity of this lost family man’s mission by infusing his death drive with physical comedy. The result is Park’s most mordantly  and timely satire that skewers the indignities of modern labor, the fragility of masculine pride, and the absurd moral contortions we perform to preserve a scrap of dignity inside the late-capitalist, AI-encroached machine, where self-respect is inseparable from self-delusion.

Beneath the film’s slapstick hysteria lies “the bitter capitalist realitym of making ordinary folks point knives at each other.”

Park has never received major recognition — despite virtuoso works like Joint Security Area, Oldboy, The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave.

It took over 20 years to make ths movie

I instantly had ideas for things I was excited to change or add. The tragedy of the book was very compelling to me, but I felt there was potential for black comedy. I also had the idea of adding a layer — that the protagonist’s wife and son would end up gaining some understanding of the terrible things he has done. When people tell themselves, “I’m doing it for my family,” the thing they are doing — or the pursuit of it — is what ends up damaging or dismantling their family. What a pitiful paradox.

This uncertainty is what I aimed for, and this question is what intrigued me. As the audience leaves the theater, how will they interpret the future of this family? For example, one of Man-su’s biggest motivators is to avoid being forced into selling the family home. And toward the end, Mi-ri, his wife says, “We’re not going to sell the house.” But she adds, “We can’t — we just planted that apple tree!” There are two ways of interpreting this. She could be saying, essentially, “We’ve built and nurtured this home together. We’ve done so much together, we can’t let that go.” Or she could be hinting that she knows there’s a dead body buried under that apple tree. In that case, she’s saying, “If we sell the house, the new owners might accidentally dig up a corpse. We can never let that happen, which means we can never leave. I know the things you’ve done, and we’ll never go back to the way things were.” There are similar ambiguities about what the children know and how it has affected them.

This film more overtly comedic than most of your films

As he says in the film, the gun should be pointed at the enemy, not at your friend. You have to take on the system. The solution to our problems can only be found by fighting the system. But very foolishly, he’s targeting his fellow colleagues — the poor laborers who are in the same precarious position he is in. This leads him to commit terribly immoral acts, all the while telling himself he has no other choice — that he’s doing it all for his family. And the result, as we’ve discussed, is that he only degrades himself and his family in the process. So, it’s very likely that everything he has done is in vain. It’s tragic, but there’s also such absurdity to it.

Formative influences

And then he shouts those great lines. As we’ve seen, Man-su’s been observing his target, Beom-mo, for some time — and they have a lot in common besides both being laid-off paper-mill workers. They both have a hobby that’s also a passion. Man-su locks himself in his greenhouse all the time, working on bonsai trees and plants for his garden. Beom-mo is really into audio and vinyl records. So I wanted to utilize that commonality.

These men do have “other choices”?

Man-su has been observing Beom-mo’s life carefully, and he’s frustrated by what he’s seen. So he shouts, “You won’t even listen to your wife’s reasonable suggestions! What’s wrong with opening a vinyl café as she told you?!” Of course, these are all the things he should be saying to himself. We’re revealing that some part of him knows this about his own situation, but he rejects it. He could just sell his house and move the family into something more modest, and possibly pursue gardening, which he loves — this would be so much better than killing people so that he can stay in the paper industry. But he rejects it. Beom-mo is an opportunity to yell at himself, in a sense. It’s almost as if he’s shouting into a mirror.

There’s a third party in the melee too — Beom-mo’s wife, who has been having an affair. Beom-mo assumes Man-su is his wife’s lover, so when Man-su attacks him and begins shouting these things, he doesn’t question why he knows this stuff about his life. Instead, he cries out, “She even tells you these things?!” — like, “I understand she’s having an affair, but she tells you about our personal life too?” That’s deeply hurtful to him — and Man-su actually feels bad for him in that moment, even as he’s attempting to kill him, and that’s another funny beat. Meanwhile, Beom-mo’s wife enters the scene. She tries to protect her husband by attacking Man-su, but at the same time, she agrees with the things he’s been shouting at Beom-mo, so she’s also screaming at her husband and attacking him with her words. So we have this ridiculous circular chaos. The funniest part to me is that amid this violence — as someone is literally trying to kill him — the thing that enrages Beom-mo the most is when his wife’s top starts to slip down. He’s about to be murdered, but the thing that makes him let out the most pitiful scream is the fact that his wife’s skin is showing.