As IndieWire’s David Ehrlich alluded to in his rave A- review of Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” when it made its lauded premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, this is a movie about slaying the competition. Literally. And now the “No Other Choice” trailer is here. Watch it below.
The film stars Lee Byung-hun as a middle-aged man who suddenly loses the job he’s held for several decades. With the job market looking especially bleak, he embarks on a radical course: Murdering the fellow applicants for the role on which he’s set his cap. A whirlwind of bloody shenanigans ensue, all with Park’s singular blend of the bloody and the humorous, in what Ehrlich called one of the South Korean auteur’s most mainstream-accessible movies yet. As a result, IndieWire’s Awards Editor Marcus Jones think “No Other Choice” may have real legs for Park in the forthcoming Oscar race.
Ehrlich wrote that it’s the “rare film that feels sympathetic toward its protagonist without ever rooting for him, and Lee’s elastic performance as Man-su — clumsy, pathetic, cucked by osmosis, and still only a hair worse than we are — is key to the balancing act of Park’s tragicomic tone. Easy to roll your eyes at from the opening scene and increasingly pigheaded in all of the ones that follow, Man-su starts off a long way from likable and tumbles much lower in our estimation from there. But the high-wire nature of the movie’s plot requires us to appreciate the credibility of Man-su’s conviction without necessarily sharing it ourselves (there’s a terrific scene where an oblivious Man-su lectures one of the men he wants to kill with all of the same perspective we’ve been screaming at him in our heads), and no one on Earth can match Park’s signature ability to make characters more endearing as they stumble toward the void.”
“Miri’s final decision to [redacted] is as easy to rebuke as Man-su’s initial decision to become a serial killer, but — to the immense credit of a slaphappy movie with a surprisingly powerful sting — it’s also just as difficult to dismiss outright. She holds onto the only choice that all of this madness has left her with, and as the world around her surrenders its last measure of agency to the demands of an apathetically efficient future (shoutout to AI!), Miri’s refusal to abandon what’s left of her own almost feels like its own fucked up kind of heroic act. Capitalism won’t ever care about you, but people will always be full of surprises.”
Neon will open “No Other Choice” in select theaters on Christmas Day with a wide expansion in January.
