‘NO OTHER CHOICE’ Is Park Chan-wook’s Darkly Comic Stand Against Humanity Becoming Replaceable

A searing South Korean social satire about the accelerating impossibilities of employment in 2025, No Other Choice doesn’t give an inch. The new film from legendary director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) stars Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin as a husband and wife forced to reconsider their socioeconomic standing when patriarch Man-Su is laid off from his cushy white-collar job at a paper company looking to upscale efficiencies and downscale headcount. An updated reimagining of Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror thriller novel The Ax, the story follows Man-Su as he resorts to any means necessary to re-enter the workforce—including killing off his competition. After all, he has no other choice.

Park Chan-wook made a name for himself in the international film community by boldly holding nothing back. With No Other Choice, the 62-year-old South Korean native hasn’t lost a step. His 13th film manages to be deeply poignant, darkly funny, and unmistakably human in equal measure, dissecting how the modern collective sense of self-worth is intrinsically tied to an ability to create capital—and the dehumanization inherent in mass layoffs. As Man-Su attempts to explain to the American investors who seize operational control of the company he’s worked tirelessly for over 25 years, in Korea to “ax” somebody is really no different than taking off their heads. It’s a metaphorical beheading as much as it is a literal one. The shame and guilt surrounding an extended subsequent job search betray the fact that one’s self-worth is deeply dependent upon one’s employment. From almost every aspect, to be unemployed is to lose empowerment and agency. We see applicants coming to pieces as days stretch to weeks stretch to months stretch to years. The ego dries up like the failing liver of an alcoholic, desperate for one more pull to prove to your family that you’re actually worth something. With all that at stake, there’s really no other choice but to seek employment by any means necessary. As Man-Su’s finances collapse in on themselves and his home goes up for foreclosure, the dedicated family man realizes that after a year of looking, he can no longer leave his future prospects up to chance. When he sets his mind to killing a professional peer in order to seize his job, he realizes that his ascension into the role is anything but assured—so he hatches a secondary plan to kill off anyone within a 100-mile radius whose job title and skill set are slightly superior to his. His kill list – etched on paper – is three names long. A man’s gotta eat, and soup sans meat just isn’t cutting it for his upper-middle-class family. As he is wont to do, Chan-wook gracefully blends elements of dark comedy and crime fiction into this hyper-relevant satire—one that increasingly speaks not only to our immediate present but even more so to our fast-impending future.

Man-Su is, in many ways, not that outrageous of a proxy for the plight of the disaffected modern man. A year of diminishing severance and piling bills shows him that nothing is off-limits when it comes to protecting your own tribe. When he first arms himself with a flower pot to kill off a potential competitor, his humanity doesn’t implode. In some ways, it expands rather than collapses in on itself as we see a universal desperation exacerbated by the proliferation of eliminating the need for humans. This is especially pertinent to the rise of AI, which No Other Choice confronts head-on. In a time of great change and even greater uncertainty, holding onto a constant like a career becomes synonymous with affixing oneself with oxygen as the plane goes down.

Lee Byung-hun (Squid Game) is outstanding in the lead role, balancing what could have been corporate pettiness turned feral survival instinct. When we first meet him, he’s fighting alongside his fellow coworkers to try and preserve all of their jobs collectively—and through the course of his unemployment, we see him shift into a political animal singularly devoted to his own ends. No line becomes uncrossable when a man is at war for his family, and Byung-hun distills the character’s notes of horror, banality, and grace into a single, understanding individual who wouldn’t be out of place alongside the likes of Patrick Bateman, Lou Bloom, Tom Ripley, or Jordan Belfort—though his South Koreanness, and the looming sense of economic desperation inherent in modern Korean filmmaking, is equally essential to the picture’s full effect. Insomuch as the Best Picture-winner Parasite spoke to South Korea’s staggering wealth inequality, No Other Choice speaks to something equally essential: the paradigm of existing in a world that demands we work, while subsequently eliminating human opportunities to work.

There are a number of stunningly crafted shots—a boilermaker sliding down the gullet; a husband and wife communicating over the phone miles away (physically and metaphorically) but superimposed to be super close; the repeating vignette of Man-Su digging deeper and deeper and deeper into the wet soil—and no shortage of striking technical elements, proving the veteran director hasn’t lost a step in this urgent cinematic yawp. Chan-wook is frequently cited for his stark use of cinematography, clever framing, unrelentingly dark black humor, and no-holds-barred approach to adult material, but this is perhaps one of his most shatteringly pointed films to date. On the precipice of AI video content being indistinguishable from “real” video (what that distinction may mean in 10 years, I am not sure), maybe he felt he had no other choice.

CONCLUSION: ‘No Other Choice’ is an expertly constructed social satire from Park Chan-wook that harkens to its South Korean compatriot ‘Parasite’. Come for the bloody thrills, stay for the pertinent message about humanity and their employment crisis circa 2025.