The FIPRESCI Jury: “We Had No Other Choice”
At the 36th edition of the Stockholm International Film Festival, 135 films were showing. The November darkness had fallen over Sweden’s capital; the sun was out only a few hours a day. At the festival screenings in the various classic and retro cinemas of Stockholm’s inner city, many films were truly excellent.
Auteurs from around the world told beautiful tales—some highly conceptual, some quietly intimate—in the Open Zone category. In the Masters category, the latest works from celebrated star directors such as Werner Herzog and Lynne Ramsay were on glorious display.
The FIPRESCI jury, however, were ultimately unanimous in our winner of the FIPRESCI prize. We simply had no other choice.
A man barbecues while the last rays of summer sun shine golden, and the crape myrtle tree unleashes its pink petals in the capricious wind. He gathers his family—his wife, teenage stepson, and ten-year-old daughter—in a large, loving embrace. He is a rich man, in all aspects. “I’ve got it all,” he sighs contentedly. Knowing the irony of life and art, such a sentence should never be exclaimed without knocking on wood. Even though his life’s work is in paper and pulp, Yu Man-su had no wood on hand to knock on.
The paper company is making massive redundancies. Losing his job as well as potentially losing his house sends Man-su into a world of desperation where all bets are off. “There’s no other choice,” says the American executive responsible for the layoffs. There’s also no other choice for Man-su than trying to find a new job, and after a while no other choice than killing the man whose job he covets, and then no other choice than violently eliminating his potential competitors.
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (Eojjeolsuga eobsda, 2025) is a mad, satirical dramedy about the depravation of late-stage capitalism, the desperation of cut-throat individualism, and the degradation of redundancy in a world of evolving technology. It is not only beautifully but playfully crafted, combining visually sumptuous shots and surroundings with an unexpected, downright mischievous mise-en-scène. The script, adapted and transposed from the 1997 novel The Axe by Donald Westlake, is layered and deliciously ironic. Park’s direction—camera placement and movement, sound design, the inclusion of contemporary means of communication, and lighting techniques—is ingenious, inspired.
The light is a key player. The artificial lighting at its beginning highlights the folly of the film, the absurd fable that is about to unfold. Later, in a job interview, Man-su is distracted by the strong light reflecting from a building opposite, blinding him, and making him sweat (invoking an amusing parallel to Albert Camus’ The Stranger, where the strong sunshine blinds and makes a murderer out of anti-hero Meursault). It seems that the world is perpetually hostile to him, constantly goading him towards the edge.
Another testament to the impish quality of Park’s direction is a scene where Man-su makes a difficult decision to have a U-boat—a large beer with a shot of whiskey plopped inside. The scene is filmed through the bottom of the glass. As he finishes the drink, the empty shot glass is suctioned in by his final gulp and then rattles down in its emptied chamber. The shot, filling Man-su with the poison of alcoholic drink and the viewer with the sense that everything is about to go very wrong, is as unexpected as it is supremely fun.
Possibly the main point of brilliance in No Other Choice is Park’s ability to seesaw between different registers and genres—seamlessly switching gears between the tragically sinister, the crackingly thrilling, and the absurdly comical, all while maintaining the film’s momentum. The path of the plot, straightforward as it might seem at first glance, twists this way and that, and we are never quite able to tell what is around the next bend.
Man-su’s murderous mission sometimes veers off track, and he finds himself performing ludicrous side-quests such as trying to spare one of his soon-to-be murder victims the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity—this leads up to one of the film’s most memorable scenes, where Cho Yong-pil’s Red Dragonfly blares over unintelligible but subtitled dialogue.
In Man-su’s case, within the bounds of harshly disciplined South Korean work culture, losing his job doesn’t just mean losing his income and all the comforts of his middle-class existence—it means losing his pride, his sense of direction and sense of morals. As he tries to explain to the American bosses, “You Americans say to be fired is to be ‘axed’? Know what we say in Korea? Off with your head! So being fired is having your head chopped clear off with an axe!”
For all its temporal and geocultural specificity, No Other Choice is both topical and universal, tapping into the fear of economic and social redundancy. In our current capitalist dog-eat-dog economy, in a job market where AI is rapidly spreading its data-ridden tentacles and eradicating job opportunities, the concept of becoming obsolete cannot be far from our minds.
To what lengths would a man go in that world? Park asks. Being an ordinary, well-intentioned man—at what point does dehumanization, and the predatory individualism in which we are compelled to participate, take over?
In this day and age, there is an art to making satire that does not feel didactic, and to making films that feel fresh. Park has managed both feats.
No Other Choice is clever, it is innovative, it is delightfully bizarre, and it is downright fun to watch. A worthy winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the Stockholm Film Festival.
Julia Finnsiö
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025