New Thing #2: No Other Choice

New Thing #2 is No Other Choice from Park Chan-Wook, director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden (which I still haven’t seen.) Whenever I think of The Handmaiden, I think of a date I went on. I think I “met” the woman on Hinge and when she arrived at the roof bar at Mama Shelter, I immediately saw that she was out of my league and I think I saw that she saw that as well. She wanted to move to one of the daybeds - she laid back, I tried to awkwardly sit/lay on my side and never got comfortable at all - and we talked for a bit about movies and she brought up “The Handmaiden” she said “Oh, it’s the most…” and then had a very awkward pause as if she suddenly questioned whether she wanted to continue the sentence but then powered through, “erotic movie I’ve ever seen.” Her hesitance at saying “erotic” did not come off at all like shyness; it was more like she didn’t like the idea of even the word erotic and myself being in close proximity, so I knew that the date was a one and done. We went to see a show at The Pantages and afterwards I walked her to her car and when I hugged her goodnight she gave an “Awwww.” that wasn’t exactly emasculating but definitely made me feel like she was wrapping up her charitable deed for the month.

As for No Other Choice, it’s the rare movie that put together a trailer that doesn’t totally ruin the movie for you. If you want to go in mostly blind, it’s a dark comedy about a man who loses his job and finds himself unable to care for his family so he considers walking down a dark path to get back to financial security.

No Other Choice is a very interesting movie. I feel like it could have gone deeper into some of these stories and characters but, at the same time, I’m not quite sure if I would have been all that interested to go much further. It might have been some of the slapstick humor in the film but by the midpoint, I felt like a lot of the film’s tension was gone. I wasn’t watching a man struggle with a horrible decision. Everyone in the film seemed to think there was truly no other choice so the film was more watching what people would do when they had to act in a way they might not want to. It was less “What will they do?” and more “Dark hijinks ensue.”

I’m a huge fan of variations on a theme and I wouldn’t mind seeing Americans remakes of this film from different angles. A full-on dark comedy. A more dramatic reading of it. Versions that take on the perspectives of different characters. This isn’t to say that this version isn’t worth watching. No Other Choice is in my Top 20 of 2025 and would be on the same tier as Sentimental Value, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, A House of Dynamite, and Marty Supreme; films I admired and respected but I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed them and I had a level of disengagement from them for some reason.