What happens when a man gets everything he wants but can’t keep it? While recent political and social media discourse has plenty to say about male grievance and dispossession, two acclaimed 2025 films offer more creative takes.
Train Dreams ★★★1/2, a lyrical period piece from Clint Bentley (Oscar nominee for writing last year’s Sing Sing), is streaming on Netflix. No Other Choice, a contemporary satire from the great Korean director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave), will have two Vermont International Film Foundation screenings on Friday, January 16, at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center Film House in Burlington. On January 23, it begins a scheduled run at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
Let’s start with the low-concept option. Based on Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, Train Dreams is an old-fashioned character study of a seemingly unremarkable man living through the first half of the 20th century. Evocative voice-over narration (by Will Patton) introduces us to Robert Grainier (Golden Globe-nominated Joel Edgerton), who arrives in rural Idaho as an orphan, origins unknown, and finds work in logging and construction on the bustling frontier. He lives aimlessly until he meets and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones), with whom he has a child and builds a riverside cabin.
This home becomes Robert’s idyll, the place he dreams of during the months he spends away logging. He’s haunted by an incident he witnessed working on the railroad that underlines the injustice and precarity of life, casting a shadow over his own future.
Train Dreams is a hard movie to talk up. If you’re thinking it sounds plotless and style-driven, you’re not entirely wrong. But the film is much more than just a showcase for Adolpho Veloso’s rich, pictorial cinematography (winner of the Critics Choice Award) or even for Edgerton’s underrated ability to infuse tough, grizzled men of few words with emotion.
It takes great craftsmanship to tell the story of an ordinary life in a way that elevates it into a representative one, without falling prey to pretentiousness. Bentley displays that level of skill in this immersive, dreamlike work.
Largely a series of pungent anecdotes showcasing great actors (including Kerry Condon and William H. Macy), Train Dreams brings tears to our eyes because we can’t help seeing parallels to ourselves in Robert’s desires, fears, losses and moments of grace. While the story hinges on a nightmarish dispossession, it’s not primarily about revenge, rage or even stoic endurance (though Robert excels at the latter). It’s about living through, living on and watching scorched terrain gradually heal.
Endurance doesn’t come so easily to Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), the white-collar family-man protagonist of No Other Choice. In the first scene, a backyard barbecue that shows off his aspirational lifestyle, Man-su makes the mistake of declaring, “I’ve got it all!” A cloud promptly covers the sun, foreshadowing the next scene, in which he’s laid off. When Man-su appeals to the American company that just bought the paper mill where he’s toiled most of his life, the rep tells him with a shrug, “No other choice.”
Jobs are rare in Man-su’s dying industry. As the months of unemployment pile up, his practical wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), gets part-time work and announces a draconian new budget, which includes selling the family home. Man-su resists these changes, fearing for both his marriage and the future of his daughter (So Yul Choi), who needs expensive cello lessons for her mental health.
Then Miri makes an offhand remark about wishing lightning would strike another paper-mill manager (Park Hee-soon). Deciding he has “no other choice,” Man-su plots to murder this man — and two other potential rivals for the job.
No Other Choice ★★★1/2 is a dark comedy to its core, with a deliberately hyperbolic style. Though the screenplay is clever, Park does much of his storytelling nonverbally, through sight gags, set design, action choreography and surreal visual effects. Everything we see on-screen is designed to complement the perfectly calibrated expressions on Lee’s face, as Man-su transforms from a clownish everyman into an incompetent yet determined criminal.
The filmmaking is so busily inventive and entertaining that we may not immediately register the tension at the heart of No Other Choice. Rarely has a story felt so contemporary and so retro at the same time. Man-su’s plight couldn’t be more now: Automation has made him redundant to executives who tout their new “lights-off” factory run by AI. Yet his desperate need to be head of the household, and his obsessive fear of his wife’s infidelity, feel like relics of a slightly bygone era — or perhaps of The Ax, the 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel on which the film is based.
At least for U.S. viewers, Man-su is a more comically pathetic than sympathetic figure, given that his insistence on restoring his life to its exact former state comes with an attachment to the paper industry. “Pivoting,” every LinkedIn user’s favorite buzzword, isn’t on his radar.
But that may be the point. Follow Park’s subtextual clues — including a weird fixation on plants — and you’ll soon suspect that No Other Choice isn’t actually about a man reclaiming what society owes him. It’s about the folly of believing we can own anything in this life, especially an idealized past.
The film’s last scene is steeped in irony, and the end credits introduce another motif No Other Choice shares with Train Dreams: trees meeting the ax. Helpless witnesses to a century of overweening human ambition, these sylvan sentinels appear to get the last word.
This article appears in The Wellness Issue • 2026.
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