Park Chan-wook’s upcoming crime saga “No Other Choice” was considered one of the major omissions from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. But the South Korean auteur’s twelfth feature, which was reportedly not ready in time for Cannes, appears to be making up for lost time with a fall festival run.
Neon has released the first teaser for Park’s new film, which stars “Squid Game” villain Lee Byung-hun and Korean actress Son Ye-jin as a married couple whose lives take a dark turn after he is fired from a paper company and struggles to find other work. The dark comedy is adapted from prolific mystery author Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax.”
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“No Other Choice” was acquired by Neon in June, with IndieWire previously reporting that the film was expected to premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. A fall release date could put it on the road to landing an Oscar nomination — a goal that evaded Park’s previous film, “Decision to Leave.”
In a 2024 interview with The New Yorker, Park admitted that the Oscar snub disappointed him, as he missed out on the potential career benefits that awards can bring.
“It would be hypocrisy to say that art is the only thing that matters,” he said. “If you get an award, it might mean you have more power, more creative freedom, in your next project. It might mean you can have a bigger budget. Maybe you can have more freedom and a bigger budget, depending on how big the award is.”
“Decision to Leave” was praised by critics following its 2023 Cannes premiere, with IndieWire’s David Ehrlich writing “Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: The most romantic movie of the year (so far) is a police procedural. Then again, I wasn’t aware that ‘Oldboy’ director Park Chan-wook — whose operatic revenge melodramas have given way to a series of ravishingly baroque Hitchcockian love stories about the various ‘perversities’ that might bind two wayward souls together — was making a detective thriller. In that case, the heart-stirring potential of the Korean auteur’s new detective saga would have been as obvious as the identity of its killer.”
Neon will release “No Other Choice” in theaters this fall. Watch the teaser below.
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