It is rather clear why an American audience would resonate more with a movie like No Other Choice (2025). It has all the right visual cues of classic Hollywood—the summer beach-villa-styled house in the middle of town and the empty shoe store. There are also images shot in cold light, the exact opposite of the warm, orange-tinted texture of most other Korean movies. And there is the feeling of vapidness, of an entire universe of massive vanity—woven into the film itself. It gnaws at your soul and drains it properly, whereas other Korean films usually offer a warm embrace.

And that sort of warmth clearly doesn’t make the cut for the Oscars. It just makes things—Korean—too Korean to hit the global stage. 

The Hype

Nobody asked fandoms to ever make sense. It is entirely a vibe-based economy.

Nobody on Twitter rioting in January 2026 cared to explain why it was the Korean movie of 2025 that deserved the Oscar. Every fandom has an unwritten rule: “thou shalt not ask any questions.” A Twitter gang is always ready to rough you up if you violate it. And then everybody condemns the Academy Awards for not giving it a nomination.

Sadly, that’s what the situation is at the moment. Name a fandom, and insanity is a dime a dozen—whether it’s BTS, Mr. Queen, or Vincenzo. Evidently, this also means business for the agencies. This online insanity gives them free marketing at zero cost.

But Korean content itself frequently stands on the polar opposite. It leaves no stone unturned when exploring subjects. The mindless insanity of fandom is a subject too. It already turned into a story in the K-drama Celebrity (2023).

The greatest outcome of the online brawl happens to be a very mainstream audience that has finally learned how to question institutions like the Oscars. They have also somehow found out about the true politicized nature of the biggest award ceremonies.

May it save the entire film fraternity one day by convincing everyone to stop celebrating the award.

Amen.

Some Simple & Curious Questions

Some very simple questions should have followed.

Was it the best Korean movie of 2025? Was it even the best from the director, who had been excelling at his craft until he decided to mimic Hollywood?

Ever since Parasite (2019) won the Oscars, people have rightfully demanded more Korean films achieve the same. However, the Oscars isn’t a Korean film award ceremony. It is American. Naturally, it doesn’t revolve around Korean films.

Some people on Twitter barely managed to mention that without being heckled. They told others that it could only win in the Best Foreign Film category. In fandoms, that is an act of bravery.

On the other hand, people are also capable of collectively pretending they care about a film when all they care about is pushing their tweet up in the algorithm. That was very much happening as the calendar turned into a new year, just as it did the previous year.

The Film Itself

No Other Choice is a Chaplinesque movie. Except it is too gross. Thankfully, it doesn’t show the grossness very vividly. Lee Byung-hun did his best to convey the character.

The camera does create its own visual language. The opening scene starts with a number of zoom-ins and zoom-outs and tracking shots that frequently alter the sizes of the characters. This often makes the audience feel like a god, almost as if they were invited to watch the film from the sky above and observe the destinies of the characters as they turn tinier by the minute.

But that is all there is to it. Otherwise, it is mostly a lame attempt at making a Hollywood movie in Korea. It happens to be a Korean adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, The Ax. The updated storyline basically pretends to catch up with the rapidly changing world, where AI is taking over everything. As this phenomenon drives blue-collar workers into the streets after massive layoffs, they are forced to make hard choices.

In other words, murderous choices.

It is a film where a joke about poverty consists of cancelling Netflix. It is a smart joke, because that’s really where measuring one’s misfortune now starts in urban life. But the rest of the humour in the rest of the film doesn’t really feel funny at all. It simply makes the characters look stupid.

Evidently, the film also wanted to be memorable with dialogue like “we firmly reject applications by the internet.” But it didn’t result in a flood of internet memes about the job market, as the director might have hoped. And that might have been very heartbreaking for him, too.

It is clear that he set out to make a groundbreaking, stand-out-from-the-crowd film and ended up making a rather tedious movie. But that happens to every artist, does it not?

And the Director Without an Oscar 

The LGBTQ audience of Korean films fondly remembers Park Chan-wook for his radically feminist and radically anti-colonial film, The Handmaiden (2016). He also has I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK (2006) and the Vengeance Trilogy in his portfolio.

Unlike No Other Choice, they were very Korean in nature, in the sense that they came to define what watching a Korean movie feels like. But now, with this Adam’s “job and paradise lost” story, it feels hard to tell who betrayed whom. Was it the Oscars, or Chan-wook himself, betraying the Koreanness? Does the Korean aesthetic feel too cheap now?

There are dangers in making an intellectual film. It does not suit everyone. Very often, it becomes a tiresome charade.

The Oscars is not a certification. It does not make a film great, and it never did. And his fans ended up inflicting a kind of self-insult on themselves, which very much became a racist spectacle.

Thankfully, nobody watches a Korean film based on how many Oscars it has bagged. That is a gold standard that became possible only with Korean films, because until Korea, Hollywood never left much space for non-American movies.

And someday, when Asians stop feeling too small in front of Hollywood, the cries for Oscars too will stop.