Venice Film Festival 2025, Review of movie No Other Choice

Can job loss affect a person’s psyche to the point of driving them to murder? We’re in Japan, and young Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun)—a paper production specialist with twenty-five years of experience—loses his job. While searching for new employment, he clashes with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), who impacts his mental state by deciding to eliminate superfluous expenses. Among these are a streaming platform subscription, the expenses of the house that must now be sold, and then—ironically—the presence of too many mouths to feed. In reality, these are the dogs that will need to be entrusted to his mother-in-law.

Man-soo then decides to bypass the job interview process and track down three candidates competing for the position he covets. Once found, he attempts to eliminate them: the first dies in a rather comical manner—due to the actions of the man’s own wife who has a lover—and the second is killed.

In the end—from a perspective completely different from a Western plot where the culprit almost always faces punishment—we see that Man-soo may find his path in a new paper company. Park Chan-wook’s film “No Other Choice” manages to merge irony with wit, drawing on a directorial style that knows how to amplify trivial elements, such as the frame of an aching tooth that erupts from the screen.

The film is not always fluid in its narrative transitions, but rather often veers into grand guignol, focusing on killings and burial techniques. Chan-wook had accustomed us to far different labyrinths of the mind with “Old Boy” and “Decision to Leave,” both winners at the Cannes Film Festival. But now he alternates between tragic and comic registers in a more postmodern manner, also winking at music video aesthetics: a mixture that renders “No Other Choice” an unusual work in the Japanese panorama.