Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice arrives after two decades of development, blending dark humor with a critique of modern capitalism

No Other Choice marks a long-gestating turn for Park Chan-wook, arriving in theaters on Dec. 25 amid Oscar chatter and renewed attention to the Korean master’s appetite for violence, humor and social critique. The director’s latest project reimagines Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax as a contemporary tale about a man pushed to extreme actions after a layoff disrupts a middle-class life, offering a stark meditation on work, identity and the price of economic precarity.

The film centers on Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a Solar Paper manager who has weathered 25 years with the company and, as a result, rebuilt a comfortable domestic life for his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) and their children. A summer barbecue among loved ones opens with warmth, but the scene quickly tightens into a pressure point: Solar Paper is being sold to an American firm, and Man-su finds himself abruptly unemployed. After more than a year of joblessness, an offhand remark from his wife becomes a catalyst for a descent into violent means as he tries to “compete” again in a brutal labor market. The premise blends Park’s signature precision for violence with a blunt, at times mordant humor that he has long infused into explorations of social systems.

No Other Choice is not a new story idea so much as a culmination of decades of work and evolution in Park’s career. The film’s roots lie in a long flirtation with adapting Westlake’s thriller for an American setting—a project Park has pursued since the mid-2000s. He first learned he would be working with The Ax long before it became a finished script, but also discovered that Costa-Gavras had already adapted a French-language version, The Axe, in 2005. Rather than be deterred, Park says the experience clarified that his interpretation would differ: “I was honestly devastated at first, knowing that a master that I respect so much had already made a film of this book,” he recalls. “But, after watching The Axe, I realized my vision was different.”

From 2009 onward, Park dedicated himself to refining the American adaptation, even traveling to the United States and Canada to scout locations and storyboard the script. The project found a smoother path after his breakthrough with a string of acclaimed works—2013’s Stoker, 2016’s Fingersmith adaptation The Handmaiden, and 2022’s Decision to Leave—that gave him both global recognition and financing leverage. No Other Choice has since premiered at Venice and circulated through festival circuits, earning early acclaim for its timeliness in an era of AI and accelerating workplace disruption. The film has been shortlisted in the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars, a nomination that would mark Park’s first Academy Award if successful.

Park’s approach to storytelling has always revolved around digging into the roots of human behavior. “Violence has always had an important role in terms of the history of mankind as a whole and in the lives of individuals as well,” he said. “And you need to face violence in order to understand how mankind works. You can't turn away.” His films have balanced stark, sometimes brutal violence with moments of humor and humanity, a tonal blend he sees as essential to exploring the realities of modern life.

The long road to No Other Choice is also a story about how Park collaborates with actors and builds his cinematic world. He emphasizes collaboration with performers beforehand and on set, a shift he credits to early career experiments and the experience of making a short film, Judgment, in the aftermath of the Sampoong Department Store collapse. The project, produced with the support of a video rental franchise, helped him approach actors as co-creators rather than mere performers. He notes that working with stage actors, who are accustomed to lengthy table reads and deep character work, taught him to invest more in pre-production discussions and ongoing dialogue with performers. “From JSA on, I've had a lot of conversations with the actors in pre-production, and we've also continued to have endless discussions on set as well,” Park explains. That collaborative approach, he adds, fundamentally changed the nature of his films.

Park’s earlier breakthrough came with Joint Security Area, released in 2000, but he says the real turning point arrived just before that film when he produced the short Judgment. The experience liberated him creatively because he did not feel the weight of box-office tallies. He could devote himself to character work and the craft of storytelling without being driven by commercial constraints. That mindset remains a through line in No Other Choice, which Park says he would have approached differently if he had made it earlier in his career: a more spontaneous, perhaps bolder version of the project. Yet he also believes that maturity and experience bring a different set of tools; in his view, “a trained handyman” could better wield the cinematic toolbox now, even if a younger version might have yielded a more daring flourish.

In terms of casting, No Other Choice continues Park’s habit of working with top-tier talent while also building on his long-standing collaborations. The film pairs Byung-hun with a robust ensemble, including Son Ye-jin, who have become regulars in his projects, along with a slate of acclaimed actors that crosses borders. Park has repeatedly brought together a mix of Korean luminaries and Western performers across his filmography, a pattern that underscores his interest in universal themes—grievances, inequality and the pressures of modern life—wrapped in localized, precise storytelling. The project has been described as a convergence of Park’s earlier fascination with “the radical,” a word he uses not in political terms but to describe a fundamental return to core human impulses and the social pressures that shape them.

No Other Choice has been framed as a timely meditation on capitalism’s pressures in the AI era—one that resonates widely with audiences who recognize the fragility of the middle class under sudden market shifts. Park has argued that his film’s concerns are not new to him, but rather a constant through line in his work: a persistent attempt to understand how people respond when confronted with systems they did not build and cannot fully control. He has emphasized that the work’s humor, even at its darkest, is essential for balancing its critique and enabling audiences to reflect on the choices they might make under similar pressures.

The film’s festival life and festival-to-theater release strategy are part of a broader plan to bring Park’s distinctive sensibility to a global audience. He has spoken about aspiring to reach the level of cinema’s great masters and using his work as a stepping-stone toward larger, more ambitious projects. Yet even as he contemplates future opportunities, he notes the urgency of making more films for the life he has left, describing a sense of rushing forward not as a deadline but as a driver to maximize the time available for storytelling.

As No Other Choice continues its rollout, observers will look for how Park’s balancing act—between humor and violence, popular appeal and philosophical depth, local specificity and global resonance—will translate to awards season and international reception. The film’s Venice premiere and subsequent festival appearances have already positioned it as a key cultural moment for 2025, with critics highlighting its crisp command of tone and its timely interrogation of the economics of work. If No Other Choice wins the Oscar for Best International Feature, it would mark Park’s first Academy Award, a milestone that many say would reflect a broader recognition of his distinctive voice in world cinema.

The project’s longevity reflects Park Chan-wook’s broader career arc: a filmmaker who started as a philosophy student with a keen eye for systemic observation and who has spent decades translating that curiosity into audacious, formally disciplined cinema. No Other Choice, in its ambitious blend of social critique, dark humor and carefully staged violence, stands as a culmination of that arc and a new chapter in a career that continues to defy easy categorization. As Park himself has suggested, the true radicalism of his work lies not in sensationalism, but in returning to the roots of observation and interpretation, and in asking what it means to respond honestly to the pressures of the world we inhabit.