An ingenious new thriller movie is available to watch now

From the director of Oldboy, the film stars one of the leads of Squid Game.

The movie is based on the novel The Ax by American writer Donald Westlake. Transplanting its setting to South Korea, Park's film follows Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun - The Magnificent Seven, Squid Game), a family man who takes great pride in being a veteran employee of a papermaking company.

Having even won awards for his work, he is understandably shocked when he is abruptly laid off.

Man-su vows to find a new job in papermaking within three months. 13 months later, however, this has not come to pass, with his family forced to tighten their purse strings.

Feeling the pressure, Man-su concocts a murderous plan to both create a new vacant role in the paper industry for himself, while "axing" his direct competitors for the position.

There are lots of pleasures to be found in No Other Choice. Chief among them is recent JOE interviewee Lee Byung-hun's hilarious, dark and wonderfully expressive performance, playing a man whose handsome looks and polite outward manner mask deep insecurities.

Man-su's obsession with not only being a provider for his family, but having an honourable job that he and they can be proud of, means that he'd rather kill to stay a paper man than take on more menial work.

No Other Choice is funny and satirical yet deeply tragic, a tricky blend of tones it navigates skilfully and consistently throughout its 139-minute runtime.

While watching the movie, the viewer is compelled by Man-su and his actions in an anti-hero kind of way.

That said, the lingering feeling as the end credits roll is melancholy. This is particularly in how easy it was for capitalist forces to pit the papermaker against his industry colleagues (characters whom Park makes the audience empathise deeply with, despite limited screen time), people in similar shoes to Man-su who could have been his friends.

Occasionally, No Other Choice’s beautiful but ornate direction and slightly overly busy screenplay (there are several bubbling subplots, the story is a slight slow burn) detract from the genre thrills one might expect from this material.

Sometimes one longs for the breakneck energy of Park's early masterpieces like Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance.

But No Other Choice is a more playful film than those breakthroughs. Set mostly in offices and the suburbs, it takes how cutthroat the corporate world has become and heightens it to absurd, yet still slightly believable levels.

Also, there's something clever and sly to the way Park makes his audience care about Man-su, despite his awful actions. The movie's title becomes a mantra he utters to himself as he carries out his criminal plot.

But it's not actually true. He had lots of other choices.

You could nitpick the pacing and how the story plays out. But when everything ties together so beautifully in the thriller's closing moments, it’s hard to care about the slightly languorous journey to get there.

No Other Choice is in cinemas now.