NO OTHER CHOICE

Wednesday, January 28, 2026
No Other Choice   
South Korea 2025
Location: SilverCity
Showtimes: 6:30 & 9:00 pm

Director: Park Chan-wook
Cast: Lee Byung, Soon Ye-jin, Woo Seung
Runtime: 139 minutes
Language: Korean with English subtitles

Awards: Florida Film Critics Circle Awards: Best Director; Stockholm Film Festival: Best Film; Toronto International Film Festival: International People’s Choice Award; Savannah Film Festival: Audience Award; Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards: Best Foreign Language Film;  Boston Online Film Critics Association: Best International Film. 13 more wins; 79 nominations

“A deliciously dark satire that is highly amusing while packing a socioeconomic punch.”—Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews.

Park Chan-wook is a master of incisive, darkly comic tales. Featuring megastar Lee Byung Hun, Park Chan-wook’s latest film transplants a crime novel by the great Donald E. Westlake — whose work supplied source material for such films as “Point Blank” and “Payback” — to present-day South Korea, where seniority counts for little and looking for employment proves to be a cutthroat business.

Man-soo (Lee) had it all: a loving wife, two talented children, two happy dogs. He even bought the beautiful forest-enclosed house where he grew up. Then, after 25 years of dedicated work for Solar Paper — where he was awarded Pulp Man of the Year in 2019 — Man-soo is suddenly given the axe.

Soon he is falling behind on his mortgage payments and his wife Mi-ri (Son Yejin) insists they put the house up for sale. Man-soo is desperate to scoop a coveted position with Moon Paper, but he knows there are other job seekers who match his pedigree. So he hatches a plan: invent a phony paper company, reach out to each of his rivals, lure them into a meeting… and, one by one, dispatch the competition.

Brilliantly scripted by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Toronto’s own Don McKellar, “No Other Choice” is a chilling satire on workplace politics and ruthless status-seeking. In Park Chan-wook’s world, given the right set of circumstances, anyone can be driven to murder. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.