No Other Choice - Park Chan-wook
For the past fifteen to ten years, Korean cinema has been markedly critical, comparable to American cinema at the moment when, in the Land of Opportunity, capitalism was consolidating and the ideology of career advancement projected itself into a material superficiality directly proportional to one’s salary.
In Korea, capitalism was on the rise while America was binding itself ever more tightly to it. Now that capitalism consolidates in Korea, Korean filmmakers challenge it with the same force that characterized those American auteurs, above all those of New Hollywood, between roughly 1955–60 and 1970–75. At that time, in both American and European cinema, a voracious desire emerged to strip the capitalist dream to the bone in order to regain a legitimate and natural integrity. That satire, propulsive and confrontational, initially sprang from repulsion toward the Vietnam War.
And perhaps it is no coincidence that, between the protagonist of No Other Choice and his fully realized horrors, there exists an element that connects him, through his family past, precisely to the Vietnam War.
Cyclically, for the past fifteen to ten years, Korea has returned to Western theaters to confront the theme of capitalism with the excess that distinguishes its cinema. In 2025–26, Park Chan-wook, born in 1963, returns to the screen with a forceful film about the role of work.
A film not about the role an individual plays within a job, but about the role that work plays within an individual.
It is a jagged, articulated, highly fragmented film, yet among the most compact Park Chan-wook has made, about people driven to desperation by the loss of work, where desperation first takes on an existential form. Above all, it is a film of psychologies corrupted by the selective authority of a traditionally patriarchal system, dominated by the free market and presented as democratic, while in reality it remains governed by an atavistic dictatorial legacy reminiscent of the authoritarian policies of past regimes. The system decides arbitrarily what social affirmation means: professional achievement, the meaning of success. It then indoctrinates the individual to live solely in pursuit of this success, to compete in order to obtain it. A success that, when achieved and then taken away, especially when granted and withdrawn by the same entity, can drive an individual to commit brutal acts, such as killing a professional competitor.
Speaking of brutal acts…
In parables where characters, even when negative, arrive at grasping an ethic they previously lacked, becoming deeply aware and therefore instructive, popular cinema usually presents a scene symbolizing that they have “cleansed themselves” or “are cleansing themselves,” often beneath rain pouring down upon them. The characters of No Other Choice, by virtue of their social nature, represent moral abominations. Always negative, they worsen by the end. They too find themselves under heavy rain, but in this scene, they hold umbrellas.
The company, by its very nature, constitutes an aberration of human existence itself.
No Other Choice addresses the devastating conditioning that work exerts on individual identity, especially male identity, within a social body that grows increasingly corporatized, where wealthier executives assess everyone’s existence according to the importance a job assumes in their affluent eyes and according to profitability measured against the most futile consumer goods. These are critiques of capitalism and inequality, articulated through a frantic film that addresses its audience with mocking ruthlessness and in the most expansive form possible. In one word: hypertrophic. The hypertrophy of a moment in the life of Yoo Man-soo, a middle-aged bourgeois man suddenly plunged into precarity, who, for his own ideal survival, embarks on a murderous battle to avert his imminent ruin. In a class-based Korea, where professional success becomes determined at birth and irrevocably designated by family status, where no path exists to affirm oneself in sectors from which one’s family and ancestors have traditionally been excluded, Yoo Man-soo has already completed the climb and enjoys the reward: an object-family and a house he owns, filled with objects of bourgeois virility.
The large house. A wife who attends dance classes between one tennis match and the next. Two pedigree dogs, two. Two children, one not his and one a daughter, neurodivergent or autistic, a prodigious cellist. Of this he and his wife remain convinced, despite never having heard her play, even though they themselves initiated her into this prestigious instrument.
Yoo Man-soo lives a dream. In the idyllic warmth of a pre-autumn day, while the barbecue grill sizzles eel meat “gifted” by the paper company for which he works, a gift he misinterprets as an homage tied to his gender, delivered together with a letter of “thanks” for all his years of hard service. Instead of sensing, while reading, the sweetening of the pill of his dismissal, Yoo Man-soo, holding it in his hands, appears more interested in feeling the paper’s texture with his fingertips than in grasping its true meaning. Yes, our protagonist is an idiot.
He grabs his wife, they dance. Leaves fall gracefully. The sky appears beautiful, their driveway somewhat less so, like a computer screensaver. The entire family embraces. Even the dogs receive embraces. A glossy postcard. Yoo Man-soo remains blissfully unaware. Perhaps he does not believe it. He has made it, he feels he has arrived, at last.
Unfortunately, shortly before this moment, a large American company has appeared on Korean soil to absorb the company where Yoo Man-soo reached the highest level as an employee. To minimize costs and maximize output, the American corporation must cull staff.
In a country where a man’s job counts as a congenital attribute and idleness appears worse than psychopathy, Yoo Man-soo finds himself unemployed, forced to continue living with the frustration of knowing he performs a job well but can no longer perform it. Other work remains possible, in theory, but he refuses alternatives. The current sectorization blocks any emancipation from a system that already employed him. Since positions still exist but opportunities to obtain them grow fewer, Yoo Man-soo must understand that no other choice remains than slaughtering other unemployed men, those who worked in his same sector and acquired credentials and qualifications superior to his.
His life snaps like the bonsai branch he bends beyond its limit. Lying on the couch, in a house he cannot afford and refuses to abandon, he comes to realize that he must become a killer, immersed in online platform advertisements that make utterly incompetent people appear as absolute professionals.
Within the overflowing contemporary river, where words, sounds, and images lose meaning, paper remains a tangible anchor, a support upon which to leave a mark, a gesture enacted within a real, physical, bodily space.
Here the entire paper-related issue gains interest in relation to where the film ultimately leads. The paper mill that employed Yoo Man-soo for twenty-five years dismisses him after removing his possibility of working outside the very company that fires him. The film thus speaks of the impossibility of possessing multiple utilities, of the impossibility of flowing through different experiences, imperfect and ongoing, within an exploration. It speaks of existing as a dehumanized cog within a productive complex that, at the first opportunity, leaves you stranded because it finds a more profitable replacement.
It becomes impossible to act differently from how one learned within the complex for which one had become indispensable. Indispensable, certainly, at least until innovation arrives in the form of AI. Here the film reaches a crucial point: the radical replacement of labor with AI.
Yoo Man-soo ultimately succeeds. Having eliminated the competition, he renders himself indispensable. He receives a request to work in a new paper sector, to operate and supervise a fully automated process. Leaving his future uncertain, Park Chan-wook widens the frame to the deforestation carried out by machines controlled by people, prompting questions about the future of a world perhaps increasingly desolate and devoid of life.
In conclusion, this film by Park Chan-wook stands as hyper-constructed, playful, and at the same time poetic. Its layers of interpretation, already intensely symbolic, intersect to generate further levels of meaning. As when the faces of the unemployed men Yoo Man-soo must kill overlap, semi-opaque, with his own. Or when ladybugs devouring leaves overlay the face of Yoo Man-soo as he watches a victim, insects that arrive in great numbers to colonize the pear tree in his garden. Or when the wife’s body merges with the soil, softened by rain, which the husband shovels while digging a grave. A grave that must also contain fertilizer for his plants. Paper company, and an excellent green thumb.
In the nocturnal blue, illuminated by moonlight, wearing velvet pajamas, she lies on her side, asleep, superimposed upon the fertile earth, becoming a consequential part of the scene, precisely as the husband’s shovel forces her to change position.
No Other Choice
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Words by ENEA BOCCAZZI
What to read next
