Competition at Its Darkest and Funniest: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice Selected by Autumn Knight

A contented family man summarily let go from the paper mill he loyally served for a quarter-century… What could possibly be his most “foolproof” strategy to secure employment and restore order to his life? Eliminating the competition—quite literally.

Park Chan-wook, a master formalist of contemporary cinema, confronts the audience on this very threshold—straddling the precarious boundary between the absurd and the uncanny—in his new feature No Other Choice (2025), which premiered in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival.

Lacing a sharp visual aesthetic with pitch-black humor, this distinctive production forms the centerpiece of a film program curated by artist Autumn Knight in tandem with her exhibition I Can’t Complain. Anchored in the concept of “grievance and complaint”—a central thread running through Knight’s showcase—the selection interrogates the ways human frustration, desperation, and the struggle of labor are expressed behind a veil of comedy. Pushing extreme limits to reclaim his job and dignity, the protagonist mirrors on screen the very conceptual dialogue Knight builds.

In Park Chan-wook’s meticulously rendered cinematic universe, watching a man cast aside by the system descend into such a bizarre impasse is an experience at once jarring and utterly hypnotic. On the evening of October 21, we eagerly await gathering in the gloom of the cinema to witness a story on the silver screen that draws vitality from humor, yet pulses with an underlying, crushing despair.