Watch: Lee Byung-hung unravels in 'No Other Choice' teaser
The teaser, released Thursday, stars Squid Game actor Lee Byung-hun as a family man whose life and mental health take turns for the worse when he is laid off by a paper company.
The film is an adaptation of Donald Westlake's 1997 book The Ax, which was previously adapted into Costa-Gavras' 2005 French/Dutch film The Axe.
No Other Choice also stars Son Yejin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won and Yoo Yeon-seok.
Neon, the film's North American distributor, previously re-released Park Chan-wook's film Oldboy in theaters in 2023.
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SEOUL — When South Koreans start to obsess over a movie or TV series, they abbreviate its name, a distinction given to Netflix's latest hit 'K-pop Demon Hunters.' In media headlines and in every corner of the internet, the American-made film is now universally referred to as 'Keh-deh-hun' — the first three syllables of the title when read aloud in Korean. And audiences are already clamoring for a sequel. The animated film follows a fictional South Korean girl group named 'HUNTR/X' as its three members — Rumi, Mira and Zoey — try to deliver the world from evil through the power of song and K-pop fandom. Since its release in June, it has become the most watched original animated film in Netflix history, with millions of views worldwide, including the U.S. and South Korea, where its soundtrack has topped the charts on local music streaming platform Melon. 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'The more that I watch 'Keh-deh-hun,' the more that I notice the details,' South Korean music critic Kim Yoon-ha told local media last month. 'It managed to achieve a verisimilitude that would leave any Korean in awe.' :: Despite its subject matter and association with the 'K-wave,' that catch-all term for any and all Korean cultural export, 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' at least in the narrowest sense, doesn't quite fit the bill. Produced by Sony Pictures and directed by Korean Canadian Kang and Chris Appelhans — who has held creative roles on other animated films such as 'Coraline' and 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' — the movie is primarily in English and geared toward non-Korean audiences. But its popularity in South Korea is another sign that the boundaries of the K-wave are increasingly fluid — and that, with more and more diaspora Korean artists entering the mix, it flows in the opposite direction, too. Those barriers have already long since broken down in music: many K-pop artists and songwriters are non-Korean or part of the Korean diaspora, reflecting the genre's history of foreign influences such as Japanese pop or American hip-hop. 'Once a cultural creation acquires a universality, you can't just confine it to the borders of the country of origin, which is where K-pop is today,' said Kim Il-joong, director of the content business division at the Korea Creative Content Agency, a government body whose mission is to promote South Korean content worldwide. 'Despite what the name 'K-pop' suggests, it is really a global product.' In 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' Zoey is a rapper from Burbank. In addition, the soundtrack was written and performed by a team that includes producers, artists and choreographers associated with some of the biggest real-life K-pop groups of the past decade. Streaming productions are increasingly flying multiple flags, too: Apple TV's 'Pachinko' or Netflix's 'XO, Kitty' are both American productions that were filmed in South Korea. But few productions have been able to inspire quite the same level of enthusiasm as 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' whose charm for many South Koreans is how accurately it captures local idiosyncrasies and contemporary life. While flying in their private jet, the three girls are shown sitting on the floor even though there is a sofa right beside them. This tendency to use sofas as little more than backrests is an endless source of humor and self-fascination among South Koreans, most of whom would agree that the centuries-old custom of sitting on the floor dies hard. South Korean fans and media have noted that the characters correctly pronounce 'ramyeon,' or Korean instant noodles. 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South Korean fans have also been delighted by a pair of animals, Derpy and Sussy, which borrow from jakhodo, a genre of traditional Korean folk painting in which tigers and magpies are depicted side by side, popularized during the Joseon Dynasty in the 19th century. In the film, Derpy is the fluorescent tiger with goggle eyes that always appears with its sidekick, a three-eyed bird named Sussy. Though they have long since been extinct, tigers were once a feared presence on the Korean peninsula, at times coming down from the mountains to terrorize the populace. They were also revered as talismans that warded off evil spirits. But much like Derpy itself, jakhodo reimagined tigers as friendlier, oftentimes comical beings. Historians have interpreted this as the era's political satire: the magpie, audacious in the presence of a great predator, represented the common man standing up to the nobility. The movie is peppered with homages to Korean artists throughout history who are seen today as the progenitors of contemporary K-pop. There are apparent nods to the 'Jeogori Sisters,' a three-piece outfit that was active from 1939 to 1945 and is often described as Korea's first girl group, followed by the Kim Sisters, another three-piece that found success in the U.S., performing in Las Vegas and appearing on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' Longtime K-pop fans might recognize the demon hunters from the 1990s as S.E.S., a pioneering girl group formed by S.M. Entertainment, the label behind present-day superstars Aespa and Red Velvet. (Bada, S.E.S.'s main vocalist, recently covered 'Golden,' the film's headline track, on YouTube.) For a long time, South Korean audiences have often complained about outside depictions of the country as inauthentic and out of touch. Not anymore. 'Korea wasn't just shown as an extra add-on as it has been for so long,' Kim said. ''K-pop Demon Hunters' did such a great job depicting Korea in a way that made it instantly recognizable to audiences here.'
