No Other Choice (2025)

Took a long time and a lot of tries but finally there’s a Park Chan-wook movie for me. I loved this. It’s big and showy and small and mean and dreamy and all too horrifyingly true to life. It has one of the funniest, most suspenseful murder sequences I’ve ever seen.

Its attention to sound is both sumptuous and gross, forcing you to reckon with the beauty and rot of the world it depicts with all of your senses. You can hear how good the one dude’s sound system must feel to listen to, you want to touch every sweater and sheet of paper, you can taste the food and the smoke and the booze, and whether you’re working with it or against it you kind of have to live with the fact that either way capitalism force feeds you the rot. This is a movie about a guy who fuckin’ feasts on the rot, and only feels a little guilty about it.

I love how inefficient No Other Choice is, how it follows the spirals of several families who have been let go from their jobs for the sake of efficiency and profit, how their lives exist in entirely different realms of sensation than Yoo-man Soo’s, despite the fact that all of them are perverts for their industry. The picnic. The shoe store. The quiet desperation of men at the end of their rope. The way that silence is disturbed with a gunshot. 

Maybe my favorite movie of 2025.