11. No Other Choice, dir. Park Chan-wook
I am so happy I found this particular image for my review of Park Chan-wook's newest movie, No Other Choice (releasing wide, in fact, today). I remember seeing this shot and its three part composition: a red highway where the actual action takes place, a green ocean, and a rock formation in the center dividing the frame and thinking "now that is movie-making right there". It blew me away. It might be the single best shot of any movie in 2025. There are a lot of interesting geometrical compositions in No Other Choice. It is the second best-shot movie of 2025. Director photography Kim Woo-hyung is knocking it out of the park (Chan-wook) here.
If you're a fan of scene transitions, No Other Choice is your movie. There are at least half a dozen truly incredible ones. We see a close-up of our lead, Lee Byung-hun's face, and you notice a light shining on his cheek. Then we do a dissolve to the next shot, a scene at night , with the bright patch in the actor's face matched to a flashlight held up the camera. This is a magic trick, the movie flipping the light source 180 degrees. Another brilliant one is a shot of the wife (Son Ye-jin) and the teenage son (Woo Seung Kim) in this movie, both standing in the garden, shot looking down at them from above. They're together happily discussing how it was all a misunderstanding, the head of this family isn't a murderer. Why that's a pig buried there, not a person, how silly. Only what we're seeing is framed through a brick diamond-shaped decoration on the roof. We get a reverse shot of the actors sitting on the roof together, seemingly looking down at themselves. Now there's no smiles. The real family knows the truth, and down there, through this portal, is the lie they're going to have to live with from now on.
No Other Choice is an adaptation of a 1997 Donald Westlake novel, The Ax. I'm to understand that it is a bleak but satirical crime thriller, a usual from this author since Westlake was the prolific master of hardboiled crime fiction. (And I'll confess I'm only aware of his work through his influence on Stephen King.) In both versions of the story, our hero is a middle-aged paper manufacturing manager who loses his job and realizes that in the downsizing job market, the only job security can be found through murdering the competition. Chan-wook's version is about Yoo Man-su (Byung-hun), the once "Pulp Man of the Year", perhaps a nod to the pulp fiction roots of our story.
You'd think paper as an industry would be the most soul-sucking and emotionally inert trade you could imagine. It's paper! It's junk! It's literally what we use to wipe our asses with. But No Other Choice shows love for that industry and that craft. We see Man-su lovely feeling a roll of textile. "We used to build shit in this country", and such, you could have pride in a roll of toilet paper as much as you could have pride in any other object you create. Sadly, the big money is never in creating, is it?
We start our movie with Man-su having reached a perfect place in his life to his perspective. He's happily married, has overcome his alcohol problems, has two dogs, has two kids, a hot wife, and has even bought his family home back. The house is an interesting character in of itself, its layers and concrete balconies are both a gorgeous example of architecture - a home to die for - and also gives this family drama a lot of verticality. I'm reminded of the snowy ski lodge home in Anatomy of a Fall, where so much of the drama of the movie is about what you can see or hear, or what you can plausibly claim you didn't see or hear. And for such a cool, instantly iconic space, Man-su does most of his adventuring outside, out in the hills or streets - or even inside the homes of his rivals. Life rarely lets us stay perfectly happy for very long, at least without doing a lot of damage to keep things from changing.
One could easily have drawn Man-su as this predatory patriarch, living out some sexist fantasy of what a man could and should be. So much of his struggle is emasculating, losing the security of a job, groveling meekly to friends and would-be employers to give him a chance, all while his wife flirts dangerously close to an affair. We see entire Self Help groups of the newly unemployed masses of Korean aging men, being told mantras of their self-worth and positivity of the future. Man-su could be a Walter White or a Jack Torrence, who must be the Man at all times, dominating their space with endless violence. But Man-su is not an alpha nor is he trying to be one. Lee Byung-hun is playing him as a friendly neighborly fellow, most of his murdering is a comedy of errors and delays. He isn't hiding his insecurities under a strong man identity, Man-su will use vulnerability as his most dangerous weapon. What horrors Man-su does to his family are a lot more subtle than an ax to a bathroom door.
The capitalist satire is not subtle. You will not leave No Other Choice without knowing exactly what things Park Chan-wook hates and what has gone wrong with the global economy. However, sometimes the fucking message needs to be said, if not yelled, and yelled very loudly. No Other Choice is proof that a scream can be artful too.
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