In Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759), Voltaire concluded with one of the most important ideas in modern philosophy: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin”: We must cultivate our garden. No Other Choice, the 2025 darkly comedic film co-written, produced, and directed by Park Chan-wook takes this adage quite literally, as protagonist Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) attempts to ‘cultivate’ his ‘garden’ after being let go from his managerial job at a paper company. Thirteen months later, Man-su is still without a position and is confronted with rapidly diminishing funds along with the prospective loss of his gorgeous house, embedded in lush countryside. So, he sets out on a campaign to win a position at a successful paper company, Moon Paper, by killing its current manager and two other likely contenders for the job.
No Other Choice is based on Donald E. Westlake’s excellent 1997 novel, The Ax – and it does hew fairly close to its source material. There are at least two major differences, however. One is an inevitable result of the fact that Westlake’s novel came out on the cusp of the Internet revolution. Westlake’s protagonist (Burke Devore) has no cell phone, and large parts of the film’s plot revolve around letters and mailboxes. (Frequently Burke’s plans to kill his competitors mean that he lurks by mailboxes for men who eagerly come out to see if the day’s mail delivery has brought news of a job interview.)
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, on the other hand, is thoroughly imbued with the long consequence of the Internet revolution: specifically, the increasing dominance of AI in our lives. Man-su is laid off from his job at the beginning of the film because his paper company is purchased by an American conglomerate that brings technological and industrial “advances” in the form of AI that leads to the letting go of most of the company’s manual laborers. As a manager, Man-su might have been able to keep his job, but he objects to the plan for his fellow workers, so he’s sent packing too. AI comes up again at the film’s end – after Man-su gets what he wants – sort of.
The apocalyptic landscape that Man-su literally kills for
The second big difference between Westlake’s novel and No Other Choice is that the film brilliantly and explicitly embeds ecological themes in its plot. It’s apparent from the beginning of the film that one of the privileges Man-su and his family enjoy due to his well-paying job is nature. Their house is surrounded by greenery, and Man-su carefully tends his distinctive trees, his garden and his beloved greenhouse. In South Korea – as virtually everywhere in the developed western world – access to nature is for the most part one of the often-taken for granted benefits of wealth.
While this theme is not as explicit in Westlake’s novel, it is certainly present. In staking out the competitors he needs to kill, Burke Devore drives around expansive rural neighborhoods, notably not the slums of inner cities. These competitors – like Burke, like Man-su, like his victims – are hanging onto their land and to their access to natural beauty, to something still resembling the ‘wild.’ Indeed, relatively early in the novel, as Burke is surveilling the man he plans to kill and replace, he drives to a village in New York aptly named Arcadia. Burke describes driving the route he intends “someday to be my commute to work.”
The roads went through little suburban towns and even smaller farm villages, past dairy herds grazing and cornfields being plowed for this spring’s crop, and I thought how nice it would be to make this drive, routinely, roundtrip, five times a week. Not much traffic, beautiful countryside. (72).
No Other Choice makes it even more clear – largely through its cinematography – that Man-su is not only fighting for a job and for money but for his piece of nature. Man-su may have originally been fired for speaking up for his fellow workers, but he then turns to fighting for his ability to ‘cultivate his garden,’ an adage that becomes literal as well as philosophical. He is literally fighting – and killing – for his garden as well as his and his family’s well-being.
This split screen brilliantly encapsulates the beauty (left) Man-su kills for (right) – the beauty and the ‘filth’
Man-su’s journey in No Other Choice is deeply ironic, though. As he struggles to keep his access to his own beautiful natural environment, doing what it takes to get another managerial job in the paper industry, he is – because of his participation in that industry – also participating in destroying nature. There’s the obvious fact that the paper industry depends on logging. But, more than that, the paper industry in 2025 depends on AI, the generation of which is itself enormously destructive of natural resources. This is made dramatically, visually, clear at the end of the film when Man-su drives to his new job along a congested highway toward an apocalyptic-looking paper plant billowing black smoke in the air. The plant is deserted, moreover, replete only with machinery working away by itself, automatically: having killed nature, it’s killing humans too, and Man-su is now supervising its activities. In No Other Choice, Man-su gets to keep his trees, his garden and his greenhouse (for now), but at the cost of a more widespread destruction of nature. This is the paradox, in 2025, of cultivating one’s own garden, and Man-su certainly believes he has “no other choice.” The film asks us to consider that belief.
Park Chan-wook makes the ecological implications of Man-su’s dilemma and choices even more clear as he aligns what Man-su does with his father’s story. Man-su’s father owned a pig farm, but he had to kill all 20,000 of his pigs when they caught a disease, burying them all alive. He subsequently, presumably in despair at the loss of his pigs and his livelihood, hangs himself. Shortly after Man-su tells his son this story, he buries his latest victim in his garden, under an apple tree. His son, on the roof of their house, sees something of what his father is doing, but when he tells his mother about it, she assures him that Man-su was just burying a pig he cut up to fertilize the tree. The pigs that made Man-su’s father’s livelihood – and life – tenable get aligned with the competitors that figure similarly in Man-su’s own life.
What Man-su kills to preserve
One of the most telling lines of No Other Choice is specifically about Man-su’s cultivation of his own garden. Before he buries his murdered competitor, he buries some phones his son has stolen, ensuring his son doesn’t have to face the consequences of his theft. Man-su tells his son, “When the apples ripen, let’s make jam.” And his son asks: “Will the roots grow over the phones?” Man-su replies, “The tastiest things grown in filth.” As he says these words, the camera moves to Man-su’s wife (one of the “tastiest things”) sitting amidst their lush garden. Man-su acknowledges that to cultivate his own “garden” – including jam, his son and his wife – he needs to immerse himself in filth. And he does – because he has ‘no other choice.’
