Following rave reviews for its Venice Film Festival premiere in August, Neon has released a new trailer for writer/director Park Chan-wook‘s No Other Choice.
Ahead of its Christmas limited theatrical release before releasing everywhere in January, the South Korean black comedy’s new promo shows Lee Byung-hun starring as Yoo Man-soo, a down-on-his-luck family man who uses lethal means to take control of his career.
In No Other Choice, after celebrating 25 years as a health and safety officer at a paper mill in South Korea, Man-soo (Byung-hun) is brought down to earth when he is made redundant by the company’s new American owners. After several months of unemployment, Man-soo decides to take a radical new approach to job-seeking — by killing the competition.
Based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 American novel The Ax, Chan-wook said at Deadline’s TIFF Studio that he found “a lot of room to develop a bitter sort of comedy” from the book.
“So, I saw the potential of that,” said Chan-wook, noting that he added a “new premise” in which Man-soo “shares more than one similarity” with each of his victims, “like he’s facing a mirror. So, while he’s killing other people, he’s actually destroying himself.”