No Other Choice (2025)

My movie scoring system is based a lot around "missed opportunities". I'm pretty bad at film analysis, so if I can notice something I think would have made the movie better, it must be really bad. In No Other Choice, I found no such cases.

Re-reading the plot summary after watching the movie, I wouldn't change a single thing. Everything in the movie-- every character, every line of dialogue, every visual element-- all weaves together.

This is a spoiler, but one of my favorite scenes was when the main character's son (Si-one) asks his father (Man-su) about how his grandfather died. In any other film, this would be a throw-away scene, just used to tell us something about the family or used for a throwaway joke, and originally it seems like that. Man-su responds that his grandfather had a pig farm, but they caught a disease so he killed them all, by burying them alive no less. Man-su adds that the grandfather was really mentally affected after his involvement in the Vietnam War, later dying by suicide on the property they live on.

This 30-second scene basically foreshadows the entire rest of the movie. Man-su goes on to wage his own war that affects him mentally too (he even calls it a war explicitly). He kills people and takes a dead man's gun, just like his father did. He buries someone alive. One of his murders is covered up as the murder of a pig, which strengthens this thematic link. Ultimately, when Man-su wins his war and gets the job at the paper plant, its revealed to be a Pyrrhic victory since the job is soul-crushing. When the credits roll, one wonders if Man-su is not finished following in his father's footsteps.