Venice: Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice"
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at 2:27PM Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice...
NO OTHER CHOICE
In 2005, Costa-Gavras adapted Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax into Le Couperet, a stark meditation on the cruelty and dehumanization embedded in the modern workplace. Nearly two decades later, Park Chan-wook returns to the same source material with No Other Choice, dedicating the film to Gavras, and in doing so asserting himself once more as one of the most audacious and precise filmmakers alive. Here is a director capable of merging Korean cultural specificity with an elegance of cinematic form so distinctive that only he could achieve it—where narrative, composition, and moral complexity are intertwined to such an extent that a single viewing can scarcely contain their richness.
At the center is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), head of a company producing security and specialty papers, who finds himself suddenly dispossessed of the only role matching his qualifications...
Oscars (25), Park Chan-wook, Reviews, South Korea, Venice 
