No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook, last at the Festival with the acclaimed Decision To Leave (’22), is a master of incisive, darkly comic tales. Featuring megastar Lee Byung Hun, Park Chan-wook’s latest film transplants a crime novel by the great Donald E. Westlake — whose work supplied source material for such films as Point Blank and Payback — to present-day South Korea, where seniority counts for little and looking for employment proves to be a cutthroat business.

Man-soo (Lee) had it all: a loving wife, two talented children, two happy dogs. He even bought the beautiful forest-enclosed house where he grew up. Then, after 25 years of dedicated work for Solar Paper — where he was awarded Pulp Man of the Year in 2019 — Man-soo is suddenly given the axe.

Soon he is falling behind on his mortgage payments and his wife Mi-ri (Son Yejin) insists they put the house up for sale. Man-soo is desperate to scoop a coveted position with Moon Paper, but he knows there are other job seekers who match his pedigree. So he hatches a plan: invent a phony paper company, reach out to each of his rivals, lure them into a meeting… and, one by one, dispatch the competition.

Brilliantly scripted by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Toronto’s own Don McKellar, No Other Choice is a chilling satire on workplace politics and ruthless status-seeking. In Park Chan-wook’s world, given the right set of circumstances, anyone can be driven to murder. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.