"Adapted from Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, No Other Choice captures - most delightfully and cathartically - the perpetual and unsolvable anxiety of living under an economic system built around extracting surplus value from its workers. Or the dark irony that if a corporation makes a person redundant, it is strategy; if a human does the same, it's a crime."
"With this film, not to mention his earlier works like Oldboy and The Handmaiden, Park establishes himself as a director who understands intimately that tragedy and comedy cannot be separated. Here, it's the tragedy that life must be lived, that we ought to work at all, that so much in this life in fact depends on this work, set against the comedy of how somebody like Man-su sets about solving this impossible riddle for himself."
No Other Choice follows Man-su, a proud patriarch who, after being laid off from a paper company, decides that his best route to re-employment is to eliminate three other qualified candidates. The film adapts Donald Westlake's novel The Ax and uses dark humor, murders, and pathos to dramatize the anxiety of living under an economic system that extracts surplus value from workers. The story highlights the irony that corporate redundancy is strategy while identical actions by an individual are criminal. Park Chan-wook blends tragedy and comedy to show how survival pressures warp moral choices and everyday life.
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