San Diego Asian Film Festival 2025
After being laid off from the paper company he worked at for many years, a desperate family man comes up with a unique solution to obtaining a new job – literally eliminating the competition.
The film is based on the American novel The Ax by Donald Westlake. This sordid tale comes from director Park Chan-wook, famous for epics like Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Snowpiercer and many more, and stars the Front Man fresh from his success in Squid Game himself, Lee Byung-hun. Knowing the deck is stacked with the two powerhouses, lets get into the life and problems of a paper man, in No Other Choice now!
So Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) has an idyllic life – lovely divorcee wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-Jin) and her son from a previous marriage Si-One (Woo Seung-Kim), their neurodivergent cellist daughter Ri-one (So Yul Choi), two lovely dogs Si-Two and Ri-Two, and they all live in the gorgeous restored house from Man-soo’s childhood. Man-soo has worked at the Solar Paper Company for more than two decades, just recently they gave him an award for his years of service, only to inevitably cave in and sell the company off to Americans, which of course results in massive firings, including Man-soo himself.
Devastated, Man-soo flings himself into finding a new job, job-manifestation group therapy (not kidding either, this is a thing now), and of course he doesn’t tell his family. Though honestly he should have done that much earlier, for when Mi-ri finds out and uses her considerable brains to tighten everyones belts, her job might have been easier if she had known at the outset and was able to start cutting corners immediately, giving their family a softer landing than what it is now. As things currently stand, they have to move out of Man-soo’s childhood home and into a money-saving apartment, no more extraneous activities including Netflix, only the girlchild gets to keep her cello lessons as its part of her neurodivergency help, and the family has to give away the two extra mouths they can’t afford to feed now.
None of this makes anyone happy, and Man-soo himself is especially wrecked when his doggie-less daughter won’t talk to him at all. After learning that a rival paper company, Papyrus, is planning on hiring a paper man with years of experience to run their newly-burgeoning operations, Man-soo conceives a rather dastardly plan to ensure he himself gets that position, and woe betide anyone who stands in his way.
Man-soo creates the fictitious Red Pepper Paper Company to get the information of other paper men who would be his top rivals for Papyrus, and after whittling down his choices to the top 2-3 candidates, prepares himself to outright off the competition. It actually takes a lot of effort and steeled nerves to kill one person, let alone three, completely get rid of any evidence, and all while keeping said secrets from ones family, friends, and hey perhaps especially, the cops. Though Man-soo seems to have forgotten that his wife Mi-ri is actually the smart one of the family, and rather than becoming a murderer and undertaker all b his lonesome, Man-soo could have consulted Mi-ri and at least come up with less conspicuous ways to kill with her help. As it stands, with both Mi-ri and her son being aware of whats going on, Man-soo is very fortunate that their love outweighs any doubts.
The slapstick-y scenes where Man-soo girds his loins and initially tries to kill these men, are funny, but also desperate and sad. Man-soo, and his family too, all seem to be very smart and resourceful folk, and if Man-soo had put all that considerable effort into making Red Pepper Paper Company a thing, bringing together all the unemployed paper men who wrote in looking for a job as his own rival start-up company, things could have turned out remarkably differently. As it is, the ending of No Other Choice leaves Man-soo a very changed man, but hey, at least he’s employed again.