This South Korean film proves you don't need a big budget

A movie can have a big Hollywood studio funding it and experienced screenwriters working on the script, big stars and exclusive access, and it will still be no more, or no less appealing than a really good idea made well by a small group of talented filmmakers.

I'm looking at Park Chan-wooks 2026 Korean entry into the foreign language film section of this year's Oscars, No Other Choice, which takes just one simple idea but executes it with such panache.

I'm thinking about it against a film like the Brad Pitt flick F1 which also had panache, but which cost so much money to make the producers could have literally entered their own car in the F1 competition with their budget.

All that Apple TV money and Brad Pitt up front, and still, I'll be cheering louder for the Korean film at the Oscars.

Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has it all with a top job at a big paper company, a beautiful wife (Son Ye-jin), three kids and two Golden Retreivers at home in his beautiful mid century house in the forest outside of Seoul.

He is given a gift basket by the team visiting from the American head office and he's convinced his life has become perfect, but it is a short downfall when he hears the Yanks are downsizing the organisation and everyone on the hit-list received the gift basket.

In short time Man-su is resorting to surprising company executives in the bathrooms to beg for his job back before he has to tell his wife.

And it's not long after that before a slick and sleazy businessman is being walked through the house they now have to sell, before the children are devastated that their new home probably won't be big enough for their beloved Golden Retrievers, and before Man Su's marriage is looking shaky.

When a plum job opens up at arrival paper company and Man-su realises that he isn't sitting at the top of the list of preferred candidates, he makes a ruthless plan to eliminate the competition, something closer to a Tarantino film than to How to Win Friends and Influence People.

No Other Choice is adapted from the 1997 Donald E Westlake novel The Ax, about corporate downsizing and desperation, already adapted once as the French film The Axe in 2005, and it's not that Park Chan-wook's screenplay adaptation is particularly innovative, though it is deliciously dark.

What makes this film so watchable is the rich visual vocabulary of Chan-wook that elevate his dark comedic moments, spectacularly clever camera angles, mundane locations made to look exquisite through Kim Woo-hyung's lush camerawork.

And let this be a lesson for all wannabe filmmakers, that this film is simply about a man cracking up after being made redundant, a story that is relatable and relevant and doesn't require $300 million in blue alien CGI or Tom Cruise strapped upside down to a plane to hot you right in.

Park Chan-wook's reputation - he made the cult hit films Oldboy and Snowpiercer - actually had the film rack up more money in pre-sales, and so the film was already a financial success before the first cinema ticket sold.

And star Lee Byung-hun ought to draw audiences in his own right, being the star of the Netflix smash show Squid Games.

There's a certain silliness to the film, plenty of stagey slapstick alongside the blood and killing, but there's also a sharp wit to the evisceration the film gives to the hollowness of corporate ambition and the regard corporations have for their underlings.