Film and TV reviews

No Other Choice, five things we can learn about men, family, and being at war with the system

I recently watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, and I cannot stop thinking about it. It is a film that makes you laugh, then makes you question the laughter. In a cinema full of people, there were audible laughs during scenes of murder, not because they were comic in any simple way, but because they were staged with such grim, bureaucratic practicality. The premise is brutally simple. A laid-off paper expert decides to kill his rivals for a job so he can protect his family. What unfolds is not just a thriller, but a devastating portrait of masculinity under neoliberal pressure. When a man’s worth is fused with his wage, unemployment feels like erasure. Love becomes panic. Protection becomes predation. What shocked me most was not the violence, but how easily the system absorbs it. The film suggests that modern corporate life already trains us to think in terms of targets, elimination, competition, survival. If Oldboy was about imprisonment as destiny, No Other Choice is about employment as destiny. It is disturbing, funny, precise, and deeply humane. A film about men, family, and what happens when the system leaves you believing there is no other choice.