No Other Choice

This phrase is both true and chilling: I would do anything for my kids. 

As a parent I can confirm this. If my child needed a body buried I would grab a shovel and get to work. 

Love is not rational. 

Director Park Chan Wok and novelist Donald Westlake know what’s up. They don’t just know about parents and children they know about how much of ourselves, our identity is tied up in our work. 

However, the job will never love you back. 

In No Other Choice a father takes it to the limit, seeing murder as the only solution to his unemployment. As the only way to stop the very real and severe pain his unemployment is causing his family. 

Of course, there is always a price to pay. This is capitalism and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. 

It seems like I saw Hitchcock say that people don’t understand just how hard it can be to murder someone. 

We see murder all the time on television and in movies. But in Hitchcock’s films it was almost always messy and problematic. This is a movie that innately understands that. 

I’m not sure there is any modern filmmaker who is as close to a Hitchcock’s unique visual flair and superhuman ability to build tension as Park. 

The guy can take downing a mug of beer and turn it into an event. And what he does with murder is unique and rightly disturbing. 

According to IMDB Park believed this would be his masterpiece. I’ll let you weigh in on that. For me, I don’t think this clears Oldboy, a movie with a bar so high it would be almost impossible to overcome.

Regardless, while I didn’t see No Other Choice until 2026, it’s almost certainly one of the best movies of 2025.