No Other Choice (2025): Park Chan-wook's Layoff Comedy Is About a Gardener Who Kills for a Job Cutting Down Trees

The eels are a thank-you gift. In the opening minutes of No Other Choice, Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) grills them in the yard of the house he grew up in, a present from the paper company he has served for 25 years. His wife, his two kids and two fluffy golden dogs are around him, and a tree full of pink blossoms hangs over the scene like the border of a greeting card. He looks like a man who has everything he ever wanted. The eels turn out to be a consolation prize. The company has been sold to Americans, and he is out.

Park Chan-wook's black comedy is streaming on Hulu in the U.S., and it is the funniest film he has made. What I can't stop thinking about, though, is that Man-su is a gardener. He keeps a greenhouse, fusses over bonsai and loves plants more than almost anything, and he has spent his whole working life turning trees into pulp. When he decides to kill the men standing between him and the last open job in his field, he goes about it like yard work: cut back whatever crowds you, bury what you cut, plant something on top. By the final scene, the forest has a new gardener, and it doesn't need Man-su at all.

The Greenhouse Where the Garage Used to Be

Every growing thing in Man-su's yard was put there on purpose. Park told IndieWire that his team designed the garden with landscaping professionals, "including the tree that had the pink petals in the opening scene," and built both the backyard greenhouse, "this cave that Man-su hides in," and a bamboo forest, "because Man-su is such a lover of plants." Watch where he goes when the job hunt humiliates him. Not to his wife, not to a bottle, but into the glass room with his little trees.

That room has a history the film only lets slip. In a conversation with RogerEbert.com, Park explained that Man-su's father raised and killed pigs, and that the son became a plant lover partly to live differently. Then came the detail that rearranged the whole house for me. Man-su, Park said, "dismantled the garage his father had used to hang himself in and instead built a greenhouse." The place where he trims his bonsai stands where his father died. Park added that the father's old gun, which Man-su saw "day in and day out," is the reason murder seems thinkable to him at all.

So here is a man who tends living things at home and made his name grinding them into paper. The industry even crowned him Pulp Man of the Year. For 25 years the contradiction never troubled him, because the job paid for the greenhouse. Once the job is gone, the greenhouse is the only thing holding him up, and he will do anything to keep the house it stands on.

Firing Three Men, Corporate Style

The plan is the best joke in the movie, and Park laid out its logic for Deadline: "He creates a fake company, he puts out a job advert, he collects résumés and he picks out the best candidates." Then he lets them go, permanently. It is HR procedure with a pistol. Park also recalled that Lee asked him, "Can it be funny?", and Lee plays the answer with his whole body, a respectable middle manager slipping in the mud outside a stranger's house.

The first attempt, on the laid-off engineer Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), turns into a farce for three. Beom-mo's furious wife, A-ra (Yeom Hye-ran), is home too, a stereo is cranked so loud nobody can hear anybody, and all three end up grabbing for the same handgun, because the couple has a few scores of their own to settle. There's a snakebite. There are oven mitts. I laughed out loud and then felt guilty about it, which seems to be exactly the effect Park wants.

Then comes the scene Park counts among his favorites. Man-su, a recovering alcoholic, plans to get the arrogant manager Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) drunk while tipping away his own drinks, until Seon-chul insists on bomb shots that can't be faked. The camera even watches from inside the glass as he drinks. Park told the MPA's The Credits that the moment holds "paradoxical emotions of both guilt and freedom," and Lee's face carries both at once, ashamed and thrilled, sliding back into a man he swore he'd stopped being.

Twenty Years, a French Blessing and a Lost Masquerade

Man-su waits more than a year for work. Park waited far longer for this film. As Chris Koseluk tells it in The Credits, Park discovered Donald E. Westlake's 1997 novel The Ax and announced his adaptation in 2009, only to learn that Costa-Gavras had already filmed it in 2005 as Le Couperet. The Greek-French director owned the rights. What could have been a dead end became a friendship. Costa-Gavras let Park take his own run at the story, and No Other Choice is dedicated to him.

Park first planned it as his American debut, co-writing with the Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar, but Stoker, The Little Drummer Girl and other projects kept pushing it back. When the story finally moved to Korea, Man-su's pride took on a sharper local shape. "Korean society still has stronger traces of Confucian patriarchy," Park told Koseluk. "I was able to emphasize this with a Korean version."

Something was lost in the move, too. Park told Collider that the dance party, where Man-su arrives late and finds Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) dancing with her younger boss, was first written as a masquerade where guests dressed as famous figures from American history. "I'm very sad about that change," he said. The Korean version keeps the costumes and the jealousy and loses the founding fathers.

What Grows Over the Bodies

Spoiler warning: the next four paragraphs reveal where one victim is buried, who finds him, and whether Man-su gets the job.

Mi-ri starts as the wife who likes the nice life and ends as its co-signer. Park pointed out to RogerEbert.com that she inspires two of the murders without meaning to. She wishes, more or less, that one rival would be struck by lightning, and her reminder that Man-su once nearly choked on his own vomit when he drank becomes the blueprint for another killing. "Everyone is implicated," Park said. Lee, in the same conversation, singled out the burial where the screen splits in two and the couple's flashlights glow under one moon.

Man-su buries the gentle shoe salesman Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won) in the yard and plants an apple tree over him. His teenage son, Si-one, sees something from the roof. Mi-ri digs, finds the body and tells the boy his father "put a whole pig in the ground to fertilize the tree." It's the darkest laugh in the film, and it rhymes with the pigs Man-su's own father once had to bury on this same land. Three generations, one yard, every man burying what he can't face. When Mi-ri finally refuses to sell the house, her reason is the tree. They planted it. How could they leave?

Man-su gets the job. The mill turns out to be run by machines, and he is the only person on the floor. In his last walk through the building the lights shut off behind him, bank by bank, and then the film cuts to a forest where machines are cutting down trees. He buried men to keep his garden, and the work he won belongs to a system that clears whole forests without a single gardener.

That last walk made my chest go tight, because the film understands how completely a job can become a self. Man-su never aims at the people who fired him. Park put it bluntly in that same interview: "The great tragedy of this film is that his rage is not aimed at the right target; he points his gun at people who are his double." Beom-mo, Si-jo and the men in Man-su's counseling group are all the same man in different coats. He wins, and winning means standing alone in a dark building that needs him a little less every day. I have rarely felt so sorry for someone I would also cross the street to avoid.

Press Play If You've Ever Refreshed a Job Portal at Midnight

Yes, if you can laugh at things that ought to horrify you, and if 139 minutes of Korean with subtitles doesn't scare you off. Not every critic bought the balance: Time's Stephanie Zacharek found it "too aggressively slapsticky," and if you want Westlake's cold despair undiluted, she has a point. In that case, pair it with Costa-Gavras's Le Couperet and watch two directors pull the same novel in opposite directions.

The Academy passed on it for Best International Feature. Neon answered on February 10 with a Los Angeles billboard, NME reported, where an image of Lee hurling a potted plant (what else?) covered the "For" in "For Your Consideration."

As of early November 2026, No Other Choice is streaming on Hulu in the U.S., where it arrived in April. Turn the sound up for the stereo fight, keep the original Korean audio, and watch it with someone you share a mortgage with, then argue about Mi-ri afterward. And when it's over, go back to the first scene: the pink tree, the dogs, the eels on the grill. Every inch of that yard was already growing on top of something buried.