Venice 2025: No other choice, black comedy virtuoso by Park Chan-Wook
After Costa-Gavras, the director of Old Boy in turn adapts the cleaver, of Donald Westlake, portrait of an unemployed converted into serial murders.
For how long it has been hearing Park Chan-Wook saying that he dreams of adapting The cleaverDonald Westlake’s book on a SUP ‘in search of a job deciding to kill its competitors? A good fifteen years, maybe even a little more. Costa-Gavras has already given its version of the novel in 2005, with José Garcia, but it is not to the director of Z and Killers that we think when starts No other choice (No Other Choice), rather at Bong Joon-Ho of Parasite : the intro scene quadrille a magnificent house, which will be like Bong a character in its own right of the film, the symbol of a society slammed in double turn inside its external signs of wealth, a cozy and opulent home inhabited by a family (a dad, a mother, their two children) who enjoys without any restraint of her social success and his bourgeois bliss. It is to keep this house that the film protagonist, You Man-Su, an engineer specializing in paper, heavy overnight by his employers, will transform into serial-killer, seeking to accelerate his search for a new job by eliminating his rivals one by one.
The film’s program is known, the a priori signposted course, with its programmatic script like Kill Bill or The bride was in black (a list of people to knock one after the other) but one of the greatest pleasures that provides No other choice is due to the extremely inventive and Louvoyant way in which Park will accomplish his program. Favoring the outlets of roads, the (false) digressions, he first leaves the thriller aside to focus on the figure of this man, played by the brilliant lee Byung-Hun (actor of Squid Gamefaithful of Kim Jee-Woon and guest Regular from Hollywood blockbusters), which makes up a tragicomic, complex and very endearing character, of a supreme setting for his green plants, taken in the rets of a capitalist world which pushes him to assess his existence only in the mirror that other men send him back, all envisaged as potential competitors and enemies to be killed. “”There is no other choice “ is a replica that we will hear several times during the film, declined on all tones, the excuse that we are released when we fire someone, or shot him in the head.
The film, which combines social satire, the film black coen, the conjugal and domestic comedy, first dreaded the overflow, but completely takes off when our anti-hero ends up taking action, takes out its gun and begins to execute its macabre plan, in a virtuoso sequence combining suspense, tragedy and grotesque, where all the cursors are pushed (especially that of the soundtrack), a moment to register already in the annals of the filmo of the author ofOld Boy and Mademoiselle. After that, the film will go back down, advancing with a terrifying formal mastery, multiplying the bewitching camera movements, the hilarious, or freezing mounting effects, or both at the same time. No other choice is a moral tale full of ideas, full as an egg, the kind of pleasure of monster cinema, which, once finished, makes you want to see it instantly. It also constitutes proof that the “dream films” for many years by their authors are not condemned, as has often been the case in the history of cinema, to disappoint on arrival, generally because they were too ruminated over time. No other choice is of an inventiveness and breathtaking vigor, as if only a fraction of a second, and not fifteen years, between the moment when Park Chan-Wook had the desire to do it and the one where he (finally) realized his dream.
No other choicefrom Park Chan-Wook, with Lee Byung-Hun, Ye-Jin Son, Seung-Won Cha… released on February 11, 2026.
