No Other Choice (Chan-Wook, 2025) seems to have a simple enough plot point throughout. It concerns Yoo (Lee Byung-hun) who gets laid off from his job and looks to seek revenge. Already you can tell it’s going to be a social commentary which usually has two different paths to go down, either be a realism piece or descend into chaos acting more as allegory for the inner turmoil. This film decides to do the latter.
There are many films that achieve this well. South Korean films themself have a strong recent history of doing this; Parasite (Joon Ho, 2019) is where someone who is unemployed reaps revenge on the wealthy elite, Broker (Kore-eda, 2022) concerns someone with high debt who steals a baby to sell for a good price, this is just to name two. What these films need to do (and what I believe the two I have highlighted do) is they need to grab the audience early on otherwise their lost throughout. I could tell this was the way it would be early on and in many ways I felt myself panicking to stay afloat. Yet there just wasn’t that connection that meant when it came to the more radical and scenes displaying a breakdown of Yoo’s life and mindset, I just wasn’t believing it or even that invested in it.
The trailer for No Other Choice is probably the most excited I’ve been for a film release this year, this in itself explains a lot for me. When you strip the film down just to it’s black humour and set pieces, it works pretty well. Yet the plot, and more importantly the plot early on, isn’t enough to justify it later. In many ways the plot was fine to justify a realist telling of the story throughout, but the dynamical shifts and pathos running through it just couldn’t hold the balance for me.