This Thrilling Korean Satire Is Even Darker Than Parasite
Never underestimate the critical urge to lob another country’s movies into something as tidy as a wave or a trend—more often than not, it’s about as disrespectful to the films as it is to the filmmakers themselves. That said, watching master-director Park Chan-wook’s latest thriller, No Other Choice, you might be reminded of another great movie from his native Korea—and we mean this in the best way possible.
Released to instant classic status in 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite broke all kinds of records on its run from winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes to best picture at the Oscars to, just last year, being named the most important movie of the century so far by the New York Times. No Other Choice won’t be repeating any of those tricks, but there’s enough shared DNA in these two movies to suggest that these relative contemporaries had similar ideas in mind—both regarding what they wanted to say about the world we live in and how they wanted to say it, cinematically.
Read on to learn more and use the guide below to find some of their best-known work on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
What is No Other Choice About?
No Other Choice is based on Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel, The Axe, which was first adapted into a film by the Greek director Costa-Gavras in 2005. In Gavras’ version, which is set in France, the protagonist loses his job after his company moves its operations to Romania. For his adaptation, Gavras wanted to talk about globalisation in the age of the Euro. Park’s 2025 update gets at something even more contemporary still.
The movie stars Lee Byung-hun as a long-serving cog in the paper industry who starts to feel the squeeze as more and more jobs become automated around him. When he, too, is laid off, he hatches a plan to determine who amongst his peers will be more eligible for upcoming positions by posting a fake listing in a trade magazine and seeing who comes out of the woodwork, as it were. After combing through their resumes, he singles out his top competitors and begins to ruthlessly (and increasingly violently) pick them off.
How Similar is it to Parasite?
Frankly, without suggesting any kind of plagiarism, of course, quite a bit! Both movies focus on a similar key theme: ie, the simmering tension between the haves and have-nots and the potential violence some people may be willing to resort to to raise themselves and their family from one rung of the ladder to the next.
Both films are centred around family men who are ready and willing to sacrifice any morals they may have to protect their lot, although, while Parasite took a minute before revealing its protagonist’s worst tendencies, No Other Choice positions its central figure less as an anti-hero than a compelling villain, a patriarch with warped but comprehensible motives.
What’s more, both movies approach these themes through moments of absurdity and violence that are outrageous to the point of being comic, though never to the point of losing their bite. It’s true, Park and Bong deliver each respective story with tongue at least partially planted in cheek, almost daring you to laugh—not that it will ultimately save you from leaving the cinema with a feeling of profound despair.
Add all that to the film’s setting—soulless offices and oppressively modernist houses, the constant feeling of someone falling through the cracks—and you end up with a world in which fans of Bong Joon-ho’s classic will feel right at home.
The Director and Cast of No Other Choice
In fairness, it’s odd to even be talking about Park’s work like this—if anything, he’s been a celebrated auteur for even longer than Bong has. In fact, he was desperately unlucky not to have been the first Korean to win the Palme d’Or when his early masterpiece, Oldboy, screened in Cannes in 2004. That was a year when, in one of the most notorious decisions in the festival’s history, Park had to settle for the Grand Prix (basically second place) as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 took the main prize—and from a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino, of all people.
Regardless, Park didn’t let it slow him down, going on to complete his trilogy of revenge movies with Lady Vengeance in 2005 before gloriously returning to Cannes with The Handmaiden in 2016—where he again lost out to a more “worthy” film, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. No Other Choice comes to us hot on the heels of Park’s acclaimed 2022 Hitchcockian thriller, Decision to Leave, and his Robert Downey Jr-starring HBO miniseries, The Sympathiser—an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. All things considered, he’s on a roll.
No Other Choice marks Park’s first collaboration with Lee Byung-hun, a beloved actor in his native Korea who, despite appearing in some action films in the 2010s (GI Joe: Retaliation and The Magnificent Seven), has had to wait some time before gaining name recognition in the West. That all changed with his performance as The Front Man in Squid Game, a role that made terrific use of his statuesque features. Now, after playing Gwi-Ma in both the English and Korean versions of KPop Demon Hunters, his voice will be unmistakable to a new generation of viewers, too.
Where and When to Watch No Other Choice
No Other Choice hits cinemas on January 23—one day after the Oscar nominations are announced—and is set to be released to Mubi and other platforms later in the year.
