Competition at Its Darkest and Most Comic: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Selected by Autumn Knight
An unassuming, happily settled family man summarily dismissed from the paper mill he faithfully served for a quarter of a century… What could be his most definitive solution to securing a new job and piecing his life back together? To eliminate the competition—quite literally.
Contemporary cinema’s formalist master, Park Chan-wook, meets audiences on precisely this precipice—the razor-thin divide between the absurd and the uncanny—in his new feature No Other Choice (2025), which premiered in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival. Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax (previously brought to the screen in 2005 by Costa-Gavras as Le Couperet), the film marks the director’s first feature since Decision to Leave (2022). Paper manufacturing specialist Yoo Man-soo is portrayed by Lee Byung-hun, reuniting with Park for the first time since Joint Security Area, alongside an ensemble cast featuring Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, and Yeom Hye-ran. The film’s Korean title translates roughly to “There’s nothing I can do”—a phrasing that strikes an almost rhyming resonance with the title of Knight’s exhibition.
Fusing rigorous visual aesthetics with pitch-black comedy, this singular production stands as the centrepiece of the film programme curated by New York-based interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight to accompany I Can’t Complain, her solo exhibition on view at London’s ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) from 29 September to 29 November. Marking the artist’s UK solo debut, I Can’t Complain interrogates the act of grievance at a juncture when voice, authority, and participation feel increasingly contested, opening a critical dialogue on how power is continually negotiated in everyday life.
Bringing together sound, spatial intervention, and recent video works, the exhibition transforms the ICA’s Lower Galleries into a dedicated acoustic site for airing grievances. The main gallery is dominated by a canopy of balloons—a recurring motif in Knight’s visual lexicon—alongside architectural structures framing a spatial audio installation. For this piece, Knight recorded conversations with participants detailing their everyday irritations and complaints; the resulting sonic texture illustrates how seemingly minor discontents can betray far broader social and systemic failures. In the rear gallery, video works present earlier iterations of the artist’s sustained research into complaint, operating through sculptural objects, participant collaborations, and invitations urging viewers to voice their own discontents. Embracing humour, discomfort, and intimacy in equal measure, these works offer a definitive distillation of Knight’s wider practice.
Having trained in drama therapy and theatre before shifting toward performance in a contemporary art context, Knight often anchors her work in an initial prompt or proposition designed to provoke friction and reciprocal exchange. In I Can’t Complain, this methodology expands through live performances conceived to activate the gallery across the run. Following the opening intervention on 1 October, Knight staged her solo performance party pooper on 12 October, with a final iteration scheduled for 15 October with limited ticket capacity. Throughout November, the space will host collaborative performances alongside London-based artist Samra Mayanja and the Brussels-based duo Michelangelo Miccolis and nick von kleist.
Centring the exhibition’s primary thematic current—the mechanics of grievance and complaint—the three-film screening programme examines how human frustration, helplessness, and the struggle of labour manifest when veiled behind humour. As Knight notes, the characters across these films confront the roots of their dissatisfaction through inventive strategies, bound together by an enduring search for dignity within work and craft. Pushing moral boundaries to reclaim his job and standing, Yoo Man-soo mirrors this conceptual discourse directly on screen. The programme will continue on 28 October with Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, drawn from James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, and concludes on 11 November with Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated feature Persepolis.
Within Park Chan-wook’s meticulously engineered cinematic universe, observing a man cast aside by the system spiral into this grotesque impasse proves as jarring as it is spellbinding. On Wednesday evening, 21 October at 18:30, in the dim confines of ICA Cinema 2, witnessing this darkly comic tale of quiet desperation unfold on the big screen promises to be an essential encounter.
