Four family members are bound together in a tender knot. The parents and their teenage son meet at nearly the same height; only the youngest daughter struggles—her small head pressed between adult bodies, barely visible to the camera. Yet invisibility does not mean absence. Wedged in that narrow space, she presses her forehead against the warmth of their chests, claiming a tiny breath of air for herself. Nudging her mother’s and brother’s sternums, half-blinded, she joins the shared pulse of the moment. It is the final shot of the opening sequence of “No Other Choice.” A family, radiant in its unity, fuses into a single mass. The camera does not search for the one left slightly outside its geometry; that isn’t its purpose. But on a second viewing, my gaze caught on her—the small, rumpled figure—and I began to sense what her buried shape might represent. Seen through the eyes of the youngest daughter, Ri-won (Choi So-yul), No Other Choice becomes an entirely different film, far removed from my first encounter, when I tried to inhabit the father Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) and his weary justifications.
Donald E. Westlake’s “The Ax,” the film’s source material, gives little weight to the daughter. Park Chan-wook’s adaptation, however, recasts her with deliberate and striking intent. In the novel, Betsy, the elder child, studies at a college sixty kilometers from home—independent and largely peripheral to the family’s turmoil. The son, Billy, is arrested for a petty crime conspired with a friend—an incident that shakes the household and secretly binds father and son in complicity. Betsy, distant and self-contained, remains good, normal, and untroubled. Ri-won, by contrast, is young, fragile, and vividly present. What, then, was Park seeking to express through this change?
After that blissful embrace, Man-soo is fired. Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), his wife, begins a quiet austerity: threatening to cancel her son Si-won’s (Kim Woo-seung) Netflix subscription, warning that Ri-won’s cello lessons may have to stop, and giving up her own tennis and dance classes to search for part-time work. The irony—or quiet logic—of a wife finding employment the moment her husband loses his gnaws at him. Mi-ri was a single mother with her son before she married Man-soo and had their daughter. Man-soo seems to have concluded it wouldn’t be out of place for her to try for a third marriage. His jealousy toward the young dentist who works beside her masks something older: the unease of a man who believes a husband must sustain his family through his own skill. The dentist meets that measure effortlessly.
Once the wheels of ruin are set in motion, they spin beyond control. Man-soo decides he will not be discarded at home as well; he plans to commit murder before he is rendered useless. The only redemption he knows is to reclaim his role as provider. Drawing on twenty-five years in the paper industry, he fabricates a job posting and selects three competitors whose résumés mirror his own: Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), whose wife is an actress; Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), father of an art student; and Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), estranged from his family but savoring freedom instead. He stalks each in turn, gun in hand, hesitating whenever empathy intrudes. Man-soo is no psychopath, no victim of injustice, no soldier conscripted into war. Though he mouths the metaphor of “fighting a battle for re-employment,” he is, in truth, an addict—enslaved by his need for recognition. The phrase “paper-bread” distills his hunger: to feed his family’s approval with money earned from the very industry that once gave him meaning. He kills to ease the ache of withdrawal. His wife’s plea—must it really be another paper company?—cannot reach him. Up to this point, Park follows “The Ax “faithfully.
Yet while Man-soo envisions the collapse of his marriage, the siblings say goodbye to their dogs. Mi-ri decides to send them away to cut expenses—a detail absent from Westlake’s story. Si-tu and Ri-tu, named after the children, are sent to Mi-ri’s parents, who suffer from pet allergies. Ri-won misses them the most; perhaps they were her only friends. Crawling into the empty doghouse, she calls their names. Si-won’s friendships shape the plot, but Ri-won’s world remains almost entirely self-contained. Her cello teacher appears only once, yet that brief scene carries weight. When Mi-ri doubts her daughter’s talent, he replies firmly that the girl’s gift is exceptional. He goes on to insist that she should study with a conservatory professor, then adds that there is a reason he’s willing to pass along a student whose tuition could have remained his own. And then comes the line that seals everything: Didn’t you say you wanted Ri-won to live as an independent person? Mi-ri’s silence says enough. In that pause, the audience understands what Park has invented beyond the novel: a mother with a child who shunned communion with people, who echoed others’ words without reply. What finally drew her out was the instrument. Whether it remains a game or becomes a vocation, her parents hold to a quiet faith that music might one day allow their youngest to grow into a self of her own.
Though never stated outright, Ri-won appears to be on the autism spectrum—a detail Park later confirmed in post-screening discussions. Her drawings suggest a trace of savant syndrome: white sheets she colors in her spare moments gradually fill with circles of every hue, later revealed as a kind of musical score that only she can read. She perceives what others cannot, hears what others overlook, and translates it into melody.
More revealing, however, is how the film mirrors father and daughter. Both are consumed by devotion to a single object—bonsai for Man-soo, the cello for Ri-won. Yet for Man-soo, the bonsai becomes a symbol of control—an aesthetic of pruning the world to fit his will. For Ri-won, music is a sanctuary, a breath of life, and a future she can trust. Each echoes words borrowed from others: Man-soo parrots his rivals’ platitudes, while Ri-won murmurs adult phrases with detached calm, as if reciting prophecy. Park noted in an interview that he wanted her to appear “almost like a young shaman, foretelling what lies beyond.”
Park once described “Decision to Leave” as a poem on femininity, and “No Other Choice” as a prose study of masculinity. The distinction holds—but even prose can harbor poetry, and in this film, it resides in Ri-won. How much she understands of her family’s tragedy remains uncertain; whether she will one day build a career as a cellist, equally so. Yet as the film moves toward its finale, it is her music we hear. She performs for an audience of returned dogs, but the melody reaches her mother, her brother, and us. Only one figure cannot hear it: her father, stepping into his new job. It recalls “Decision to Leave,” where Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) never finds Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who buries herself beneath the sand. Man-soo and Hae-joon are nothing alike, yet share a blindness—they do not know what they do not know. When the camera follows Man-soo into the factory, the mechanical roar fills the frame. Ri-won’s cello may be drowned, but it does not disappear. Within that noise lies a strange grace: uncertainty, and the possibility it carries. To live with what Heidegger called thrownness—the fact of being cast into the world without choosing—is to break free from the addiction to self-justification. Perhaps that is what Ri-won’s quiet poem represents. By replanting the roots of Westlake’s novel into the soil of cinema, Park prunes and reshapes them with deliberate grace. What remains quietly ridicules its own alibi: that there was no other choice. A fine bonsai indeed.