A veteran paper company executive, proud winner of the “Pulp Man of the Year” award, has it all – a loving wife, two children, two dogs, two cars and a sprawling ancestral home. Just how precarious corporate life can be is revealed to Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when his firm is bought over by Americans and he is laid off.

Everything by which Man-su measures his success is about to disappear. He promises his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) that he will be back in his beloved paper industry in three months, but there aren’t any positions for him. Man-su decides that the best way to beat the competition is to eliminate it, literally.

This is a Park Chan-wook movie, so it’s neither straight-forward in its telling nor simplistic in its morality. No Other Choice (2025), the South Korean director’s adaptation of Donald E Westlake’s novel The Ax – which also yielded the Costa-Gavras film The Axe (2005) – is forever inviting us to root for Man-su as he sets out to murder his rivals. Man-su’s mission is selfish and cruel but also darkly comic and moving – a humane tale of despair in brutal times.

No Other Choice, which is out on MUBI, was bizarrely overlooked at the Oscars. Alongside One Battle After Another, Sinners and The Secret Agent, Chan-wook’s...

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