The first official trailer for Korean maestro Park Chan-wook‘s pitch-black comedy thriller No Other Choice has arrived.
Neon dropped the extended look at the buzzy film (below) late Thursday — and it delivers all of the pricky anticipation, dread and virtuosic style viewers have come to expect from the Korean maestro behind Old Boy, The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave. No Other Choice premiered to acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in September and currently holds a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The trailer opens ominously with Korean star Lee Byung-hun — of worldwide Squid Game fame — assembling a 3-D-printed handgun. A staccato cut of clips from early in the movie then introduces the actor as an ordinary Korean family man who has been shaken to his core by getting laid off from his longtime job as the foreman of a paper factory. The protagonist’s level-headed wife, played by beloved Korean actress Son Ye-jin, then lists the various ways the family is going to have to crimp its comfortably middle-class lifestyle until their patriarch finds new employment. As the dad goes through the motions of a desperate, seemingly unsuccessful job hunt, the wife offhandedly mentions how helpful it would be if the other leading candidates were just “struck by lightning” — and as she says this, we see a dark thought forming behind Lee’s eyes.
“To put food in my family’s mouths, there’s nothing I won’t do,” he then proclaims, in voice over, before uttering the title phrase, “No other choice.”
The scenes that follow hint at some very Park Chan-wook-esque, visually inventive violence — handguns, a dance sequence, chainsaws and various other ravishing details — before the title card slams definitely across the screen, followed by the film’s North American release date in select theaters: Christmas Day (Dec. 25, 2025).
No Other Choice is produced by Korean studio CJ ENM, the company behind Bong Joon-ho’s multi-Oscar-winning Parasite. Neon is distributing the film in the U.S. and is expected to give it a major Oscars push.
