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.”
Last month, the Korean Film Council selected the film as South Korea’s submission to the Best International Feature category of the Oscars. With Neon handling North American distribution, MUBI has acquired the title for international distribution.
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