Robert Stewart As of this writing, it’s January 12th, and I’ve already watched my second foreign language film of the year! I wonder how long it took me to watch a non-English movie in 2025?
(Actually, the answer to that depends on whether Flow counts or not. It’s a foreign-made picture, sure, but it has no language to speak of).
Anyway, today’s movie comes to you due to the fact that I have seen a lot of Letterboxd friends log this movie recently—with pretty high scores for it!—and I decided I wanted to get in on the ride. We are talking about Park Chan-wook’s newest offering, No Other Choice.
No Other Choice stars Lee Byung-hun as You Man-soo, a twenty-five-year veteran of the papermaking business (is this The Office all of a sudden?) who is let go from his job after an American company comes in and buys his firm out. Man-soo seems confident he will land on his feet, but after months pass and nothing comes up for him, he is falling on desperate times. His family is having to make cutbacks in their hobbies and lifestyles, the family pets are sold off (I’d be DEVASTATED), and they may have to sell their house, which is also Man-soo’s childhood home.
Man-soo finally realizes all of his opportunities have dried up and that he only has one alternative left: he has to kill his competition until he is the only qualified applicant left out there!
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ No Other Choice is, at turns, humorous, depressing, and emotional. It manages multiple tones extremely well, and it really takes the viewer on a ride as it moves from scene to scene. You are never quite sure what to expect next from it. Any given scene may have any given mood or intention.
Devotees will know that movies that manage multiple tones well are some of my absolute favorites. I love a movie that can catch me off guard and make me feel or think something I was not necessarily expecting. Give me a horror movie that makes me laugh or an action movie that makes me cry, and I’m putty in your hands. Or, in the case of No Other Choice, give me a comedy that makes me despair. It’s all fantastic mood work.
+ Park Chan-wook has done an impeccable job filming No Other Choice, and some of the shots, edits, framings, and transitions are tremendous. He continues to have a brilliant eye for making a film, and No Other Choice might actually be his most accessible and purely enjoyable one yet. And at the same time, these directorial tricks aren’t overdone to the point of distracting the audience from the story itself. Park just has an ingenious level of knowing what to implement when.
There are cuts that are perfectly timed and executed, and moment-to-moment transitions that wowed me. We have all seen movies pull off the bit where two characters on the phone with each other are superimposed together, but it’s different here; Park uses these edits to show how the conversation is making each side of it feel. With Oldboy being the only one of Chan-wook’s films that I had seen before this, I now know I have to see about catching up on more of his work.
– The movie is too long for sure, at almost 2 hours 20 minutes. There are characterization traits and plot points that could be dropped entirely without really affecting the overall story. Having been adapted from a novel, I wonder if everything is more fleshed out in the source material. But here, there feels like some negligible stuff floating around.
That’s always going to be a problem with movies adapted from a novel. You can’t film an entire novel’s worth of material and have it remain feature-length, but you also can’t cut everything without losing a sense of coherency. So there is a level of expertise required in knowing exactly what to keep and what to drop. And while I’m not saying that expertise was not present here, it did feel like some data was missing as the picture went on. Which is a shame because, at either a straight two hours with some details left out, or maybe extended to over two-and-a-half hours with more detail added in, this might have been an even stronger effort.
– I credited the film for its handling of multiple moods and tones, and that definitely stands. But when I settled in to watch this one, I was expecting to have a little more fun than I did. I didn’t expect parts of it to be so dour and down, especially at the beginning when You’s life starts going to hell. It’s a weird complaint, given my Ups, I know, but to be fair, it was hard nitpicking this very good picture.
If I had known before I started this one that the director was the same one who had done Oldboy, I might have been more prepared in this regard! But I didn’t start looking up the cast and crew until I was well into the movie. I have to start doing my research sooner, but I usually decide to watch things on a whim.
OVERALL: 4 / 5
I do stand by my assertion that No Other Choice is either too long or too short (depending on what other direction it could have chosen to go in), given what I mentioned above. But aside from that, you are left with a great motion picture that really blends genres well and has some standout directing. I think I logged this as a 3.5 on Letterboxd, but I’m already thinking it deserves more, and I’m pumping it up to a 4.0 for now.
