‘No Other Choice’ review: Park Chan-wook’s anti-capitalist parable skewers the job market

If you took a photo of every corporate euphemism No other choiceyou would turn around, go in a different direction, finding your services no longer needed, resized, reduced and as plastered as one of the characters.

The title itself evades accountability, a phrase used by big companies to hide behind cold, intentional decision-making. In this superb dark comedy-thriller, legendary South Korean director Park Chan-wook delivers a biting social commentary on the brutal job market and the associated hyper-competitiveness that sees applicants literally out for blood.

Based on the 1997 novel by Donald E. Westlake The ax and written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee and Don McKellar, the film presents an anti-capitalist fable about workplace politics, where a ruthless corporate restructuring drives a desperate family man (Squid gameLee Byung-hun) to violence – despite his lack of skills in this area. Although not as ultraviolent as Park’s famous Vengeance trilogy or as seductive as his recent Hitchockian film Decision to leavethe director hypothesizes the fallout from corporate layoffs through this bumbling self-made assassin – whose inept and infuriating decisions will make you think about the morality of it all.

Under pressure to provide, is murder the only option to gain employment? in this economy?

No other choice sees a despised family man in a hyper-competitive capitalist reality.

Son Ye-jin and Lee Byung-hun in “No Other Choice.”
Credit: BFI London Film Festival

In a disjointed and uncomfortably empathetic performance from Lee, the film’s core is Yoo Man-soo, a hardworking, proud, longtime employee of the specialty paper company Solar Paper. He saved enough to buy his father’s beautiful house and support his wife Mi-ri (Crash landing on you(Ye-jin’s son) and two children a comfortable upper-middle-class life, full of cello lessons, outdoor barbecues and designer goods. Everything is captured in saturated golden light and dynamic cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung – with whom Park worked on The little drummer girl series. But when Man-soo is suddenly laid off after decades of loyalty to the company, the bills pile up and pragmatic Mi-ri declares he has to adapt – and it’s not just creature comforts that get sent packing, but real creatures too, including their pair of adorable and obedient golden retrievers.

No corporate mindfulness workshop could assuage Man-soo’s fears of eternal unemployment and the societal shame it all brings. Meanwhile, Mi-ri gets her own job at a dentist’s office, where her new boss’s good looks fuel Man-soo’s jealousy and determination to regain his pride in earning a living.

Suddenly, the perfect opportunity (or any opportunity) appears on the horizon at rival Moon Paper, with Man-soo facing an intimidating sea of ​​potential candidates and AI-powered replacements. Seeing no chance of getting the job, he drafts a shortlist of candidates (Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min) who could beat him to the position, intending to eliminate them – for good. This means tricking them into applying for jobs at his fake company and preventing them from regaining their employability, one by one.

Park Chan-wook reverses his characteristic mode of revenge to scrutinize morality and responsibility.

Lee Byung-hun and Lee Sung-min in “No Other Choice”.
Credit: BFI London Film Festival

The quest for revenge and self-gratification runs rivers of blood throughout Park’s work, with revenge fueling his lauded 2000s triptych. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old boyAnd Lady Vengeance. But while the protagonists of the Vengeance trilogy had a particular set of skills and life-defining scores to settle, Man-soo of No other choice embodies both a future amateur killer and a believer in himself as a good person.

As the title suggests, Park’s film is a harsh lesson in individualistic finger-pointing and evasive corporate euphemisms that sees its protagonist deflecting any form of responsibility for his actions. Man-soo thinks he’s exhausted all options after all. Here, as in Park’s series of retaliation stories, No other choice explores moral and ethical boundaries; Man-soo feels that his behavior is justified for the benefit of his family and for his own sense of pride as a provider.

With a spectacular physical performance of pure desperation from Lee, Yoo Man-soo fights his way through violent encounters, one of which is darkly comic (and stolen by the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran as the wife of a target candidate), another gruesome and calculated. These are the scenes that see Park in glorious contained chaos mode, the master of brutal and escalating pandemonium within a single setting. Park consistently shows Man-soo on the verge of violence: the father standing on the edge of an apartment roof holding a heavy potted plant over a competitor perfectly sums up the current film “Will he really do it?” tension. Here, Park deploys Kim’s stylized cinematography and Kim Sang-bum’s bold editing to enhance the story’s more operatic elements.

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As a viewer, we simultaneously root for Man-soo and are unnerved by his capacity for calculated manipulation and murder. No other choice asks the question: would you kill for the life you want? In fact, the film doesn’t even ask for it, but rather presents a man believing himself to be forced into such a decision due to cold-hearted corporate strategy. It’s beyond his reach. It’s a top-down decision. When you really think about it, Man-soo just thinks of blue skies.

No other choice is now in theaters.

UPDATE: December 18, 2025, 2:30 p.m. “No Other Choice” was screened at the BFI London Film Festival. This review, originally published on October 17, 2025, has been updated to include theatrical release information.