Quick thoughts on No Other Choice. Spoilers ahead.
I am one of those people who thinks subtitled movies should only have a handful of lines of dialogue per minute, spoken slowly, with nothing else happening onscreen at that moment. When too much happens all at once, and parts of the text cannot be read because of white-on-white subtitles, I am often unsure what actually happened.
No Other Choice is so that type of foreign-language movie.
However, Park Chan-wook plays into that, because the film can make visual sense even if you don’t understand a word of it: a happy family man loses his job, then another job, shaves his moustache, and hangs out in a bar all day instead of looking for work. He decides to size up his competition for the one job opening that exists, and he finds five perfect, A+ applicants.
They all must die.
The best scene in No Other Choice comes when Man-su targets one of his first competitors: a once-perfect husband who lost his job and just gave up. His wife has moved on and started cheating on him, which only makes him more mopey. When our “hero,” Man-su, pulls a gun on him, the man’s wife happens upon the attempted killing and is about to clobber Man-su in the head with some sort of ornate piece of modern furniture. She holds back, seemingly conflicted over whether she wants to see her husband dead or not.
Yes, you can read the subtitles to figure out what they are saying, but the music playing in the room is so loud that the dialogue can barely be heard. I was kind of amused, seeing a Park Chan-wook movie where people who spoke the language would have no idea what was going on for a change.
This is one of those “anti-hero finds a cause worth justifying his awful actions” movies, as buying a $50,000 cello for a true prodigy was something none of his competitors needed to do. And thus, they must die.
Once No Other Choice was over, I was truly delighted. I felt like I had seen one truly new story, one that could have worked regardless of the medium used to tell it. It was exciting, well-paced, and artistically rendered, with truly great music, both original and pulled from classic archives I had never heard before.
The movie pulls so many different emotions and explores family solidarity and divisiveness in interesting ways. Seeing how different people react to the same situation — losing the only job they were qualified to have because of automation — makes vile actions seem arguably humane and necessary.
This is obviously in conversation with Parasite in a lot of ways, but altogether different and, for me, more satisfying. I enjoyed so much of this movie. While Paul Thomas Anderson makes fun of movies that actually say the title out loud in the dialogue, I feel like even he would appreciate the balls on this one. I think I counted about seven times that No Other Choice either said the exact phrase “no other choice,” logically conveyed the notion, or used some variation of the idea. This is short-film-festival-competition writing, and for that, I applaud it. I wanted to stand up and clap.
My second favorite movie of 2025.
9.5/10
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