Can a film be bad and good at the same time? Or can it be singular in intent while multiple in form? No Other Choice, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, invites such contradictory assessments. Widely discussed in Venice as one of the festival’s notable titles—and, in some critical chatter, compared to Parasite, with all the expectations that comparison now entails—the film ultimately departed without major recognition. From the outset, then, No Other Choice was positioned within a field of uneven evaluations, where acclaim, anticipation, and restraint coexisted rather than converged.
This tension has persisted since the film’s theatrical release in Korea in September, where box-office attendance has hovered just below the three-million mark. While some read this as evidence of a divided audience response, the source of the film’s uneven reception may lie less in reception itself than in its internal organization. No Other Choice proceeds through a discernible narrative line, yet repeatedly exceeds its own center. It shifts tone, redistributes narrative weight, and accumulates situations and viewpoints that resist consolidation into a unified form. The film remains committed to telling a story, even as it persistently opens onto others.
What follows traces these movements not to resolve them, but to attend to their uneasy coexistence.
The film opens with a scene of a couple and their two children preparing a barbecue in their garden. There is a hint of autumn in the air, yet the atmosphere remains saturated with the lingering ease of summer. The sequence culminates in a group embrace—joined even by the family’s two Labradors—but the sweetness feels excessive, almost overdetermined. This is not the happiness of a family without anxieties; it borders on the unsettling.
The disruption follows swiftly. Man-su, the head of the household, played by Lee Byung-hun—best known internationally as the front man in Squid Game—is abruptly dismissed from the paper factory that has consumed twenty-five years of his life. The cause is neither personal failure nor incompetence, but a shift in leadership to American management, followed by corporate restructuring. At home, Man-su initially finds refuge in the presence of his supportive wife, yet the pressure of maintaining his role as breadwinner tightens when she announces a series of austerity measures: the cancellation of the Netflix subscription and, more ominously, the looming foreclosure of the house.
A job interview at another paper company appears to offer an exit, only for Man-su to confront the intensity of the competition. It is at this point that he devises a lethal strategy—to eliminate his rivals and render himself the inevitable candidate for the position. From here, the film shifts uneasily across registers, brushing against horror, recoiling into dark comedy, and settling at times into a muted satire of global capital that feeds on companies like Man-su’s former workplace. To describe No Other Choice simply as a satirical farce driven by ultra-dark humor would miss the film’s layered construction. It is by placing No Other Choice alongside The Axe (2005), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and Ikiru (1952) that this layered quality comes into clearer view. Read as points of comparison rather than sources or influences, these films help illuminate the tonal, ethical, and narrative tensions that shape No Other Choice.
The Axe
Directed by Costa-Gavras, The Axe precedes No Other Choice as a film adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax (1997). Its protagonist, Bruno Davert, is likewise a paper man who has devoted most of his working life to a paper factory. Following corporate downsizing, he is dismissed along with hundreds of colleagues, as their jobs are outsourced to Romania. Thrust back into a fiercely competitive job market as a middle-aged man, Bruno embarks on a chillingly logical scheme: eliminating his rivals for employment. He rationalizes that targeting CEOs—though responsible for his predicament—would bring him no practical benefit, and that the most effective strategy is instead to remove those seeking the same position.
The ostentatious clarity of Bruno’s reasoning amplifies the plan’s absurdity, even as this absurdity forms the core of Costa-Gavras’s comedy thriller. Bruno explicitly frames his actions as a response to a system in which capitalist maneuvering pits individuals against one another in a struggle for survival. The Ax thus becomes a darkly comic thought experiment, one in which capitalism drowns out craftsmanship, labor value, expertise, and even humanity—seen through the methodical madness of its protagonist.
Although No Other Choice revolves around a similarly lethal plan, the absurdity of that plan—particularly when contrasted with more ordinary responses to economic precarity, such as taking any available work or organizing collectively—is less clearly foregrounded. In The Axe, the outrageousness of Bruno’s logic exposes the insanity lurking beneath managerial discourse that presents itself as rational and efficient. In No Other Choice, this critical clarity is diffused by an accumulation of other forms of madness. No one in the film is entirely ordinary: characters appear nervously shy, obstinate, or perversely excessive. One form of irrationality folds into another. Rather than operating as a comedy thriller driven by a singular, sharply articulated conceit, No Other Choice unfolds as a kaleidoscopic display of competing madnesses, none of which fully contains the others.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
As a classic Ealing Studios comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets populates its narrative with charmingly eccentric characters whose criminal actions ultimately reveal a crooked but recognizable sense of humanity. Louis Mazzini is the son of a woman born into an aristocratic family who eloped with an Italian opera singer. His father dies upon hearing of Louis’s birth, and Louis grows up fully aware of his lineage through his mother’s careful instruction. When she later dies, her final wish—to be buried in the family vault—is curtly rejected by the relatives who had disowned her. It is this refusal that prompts Louis to devise his wicked plan: to eliminate the family members standing between him and the dukedom.
Macabre and gruesome as this scheme may be, it follows a perverse logic shaped by Louis’s circumstances. He leads a stagnant life as a clerk in a women’s underwear shop, with no prospect of social mobility in a rigidly class-divided society. More pointedly, his resentment is fueled by the aristocratic family’s cruelty toward his mother, even in death. As Louis removes his obstacles one by one, the film exudes a sustained snigger at authority and at the self-seriousness of hierarchical class power. The decision to have all of Louis’s victims played by a single actor, Alec Guinness, further heightens the comic effect, turning his murderous ambition into a knowing attempt to cheat the system rather than to restore moral order.
By contrast, No Other Choice collapses the dividing lines between its central figure and the surrounding characters by distributing madness across the entire social field. In doing so, the film directs its critical attention back toward Man-su himself. Amid a proliferation of nervous gestures, strange behaviors, and unstable motivations, no one remains exempt from cynicism or re-evaluation, and Man-su’s actions appear increasingly senseless rather than strategically aberrant. This may reflect an intention to probe middle-class morality shaped almost entirely by self-preservation. Man-su begins as a figure clinging to a desperate survival plan, but gradually retreats into a self-enclosed world governed by distorted logic and dark humor, where madness no longer functions as critique so much as atmosphere.
Ikiru
Even amid its accumulation of madness and dark humor, No Other Choice feels closest to Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece on an ordinary life confronted by its own finitude. Kanji Watanabe is a low-ranking municipal official nearing retirement, whose existence has been hollowed out by routine. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he begins a quiet search for meaning. He wanders into a bar, sings a song out of character, and eventually fixes his attention on a modest request from neighborhood mothers: the construction of a playground long delayed by bureaucratic inertia. Defying procedural obstacles within the city office, Watanabe completes the project shortly before his death. The result is a subdued yet hymnal paean to a form of humanity that emerges under the most unlikely conditions.
Man-su’s trajectory echoes this arc, though in a more compromised register. By the film’s end, he regains his job, as if his relentless efforts for his family—and for himself, however close they come to the edge of insanity—have finally been rewarded. His resilience, and his determination to survive the dehumanizing experience of unemployment, appears to prevail. Yet the factory he returns to is no longer the same. Waiting for him is another, newly intensified form of dehumanization: an AI-driven automated system that reconfigures labor once again. Whether Man-su can endure this next transformation remains unresolved, leaving the film suspended between persistence and exhaustion in a world where labor itself is being quietly redefined.