Park Chan-wook’s anticipated black comedy thriller No Other Choice opened at the top of Korea’s theatrical box office over the weekend, earning $4.6 million from Friday to Sunday. The film launched in the country on Wednesday (Sept. 24) on a little over 2,000 screens and has earned a healthy $7.5 million to date. The solid start — significantly better than the $2.4 million Park’s previous feature Decision to Leave brought in during its first weekend in 2022 — marks the second-biggest opening by a Korean film in the home market this year, behind only Pil Gam-sung’s comedy-horror My Daughter Is a Zombie, which debuted in July with $8.3 million.
A passion project for Park that took nearly two decades to produce, No Other Choice premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, earning some of the strongest reviews of the festival during a notably strong edition. It makes its next major international showing at the New York Film Festival next week. Neon will release the film later this year in North America.
A jet-black social satire, No Other Choice follows veteran paper mill manager You Man-su (Korean screen icon Lee Byung-hun), a devoted family man who spirals after being laid off and discarded by a ruthless job market. Humiliated by failed interviews and mocked by corporate gatekeepers, he resolves to claw back dignity by any means necessary — a decision that sends him down a very Park Chan-wook-esque path of violence. With Son Ye-jin as his charismatic and resilient wife and Park Hee-soon as the contemptuous foreman who becomes his nemesis, the film could scarcely be more timely in the way it skewers the indignities of contemporary work culture, the fragility of masculine pride, and the absurd shapes the survival instinct must take in our late-capitalist, AI-encroached present day.
No Other Choice pulled ahead of a pair of popular imported anime titles in the weekend box-office race in Korea. Chainsaw Man The Movie: Reze Arc, a feature anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s best-selling fantasy manga, also opened on Wednesday and has earned $3.5 million (with $2.5 million of the total coming over the weekend). In third place, anime sensation Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle continued to draw audiences more than a month after its Aug. 22 Korean debut, adding just shy of $1 million for a massive $38.7 million local total (worldwide, the film has brought in $605 million, the most ever by a Japanese film).
Train to Busan hitmaker Yeon Sang-ho’s dark indie experiment The Ugly claimed fourth place for the frame, earning $673,000 for a three-weekend total of $7.5 million. Made on a microbudget but featuring an all-star creative team, the richly layered film tells the story of a son investigating the mysterious death of his mother during Korea’s economic boom of the 1970s.
