The job hunt is never easy. In today’s world of LinkedIn connections, coffee chats and endless interviews, the search for work can drive even a modest family man to madness — or worse. At least that’s the opinion of Park Chan-wook, the visionary behind “Oldboy” (2003) and “The Handmaiden” (2016), whose latest work, “No Other Choice” (2025), proves to be a hysterical, scathing portrait of modern capitalism.
Chan-wook’s first project since the Hitchcockian triumph “Decision to Leave” (2022) is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel “The Ax,” previously brought to the screen by Costa-Gavras in 2005. This time, Chan-wook reunites with “Squid Game” (2021–25) star Lee Byung-hun, marking their first collaboration since the underseen yet captivating “Joint Security Area” (2000). For Lee’s character Man-soo, it all starts with an eel. What he first perceives as a token of appreciation for his hard work at ‘Tae-yang’ Paper is anything but; in reality the fish is the first item of his severance package. The company has been taken over by Americans — whom Chan-wook portrays with ruthless accuracy — and it’s “off with your head.”
Despite this professional and social blow, Man-soo remains convinced he will land on his feet, using his severance pay and savings to continue supporting his family. His wife, Mi-ri (the captivating Son Ye-jin), remains at home with their once-ideal nuclear unit, made up of the couple, their children Ri-one and Si-one and the family’s two adorable dogs, Ri-two and Si-two. At the company’s offboarding meetings, Man-soo readily repeats mantras like “Unemployment is not my fault” and “My loving family will support me fully,” believing he will soon find a new job in the world of paper manufacturing.
However, as days turn into months, desperation seeps in. Lee plays his part perfectly here; his descent from comfort to discouragement to madness is palpable. One particularly decisive moment of grim farce comes when Man-soo bombs an interview because of a distracting ray of sunlight. Soon enough, Mi-ri can no longer afford to put the same portions of meat in her family’s soup.
Even worse, however, is the matter of the family’s home. The glamorous multi-story house, once Man-soo’s childhood home and later re-purchased after his success in the paper industry, stands as his crowning achievement; losing it would be seen as total failure by the family’s somewhat stubborn patriarch.
It is here that Man-soo makes his decision. To avoid finding out how the other half lives, he must eliminate the competition. Though he clearly lacks the heart of a ruthless murderer, Man-soo eventually narrows down his targets to two men: the drunkenly dejected Gu Bummo (Lee Sung-min) and the painfully likable Go Sijo (Cha Seung-won). Both are former paper-men, and both sport resumes that exceed Man-soo’s.
The middle act of the film largely concerns this aspiring serial killer struggling to stalk his prey, and it is in these follies that Chan-wook’s work truly begins to shine. Fueled by Man-soo’s pitch-black desperation and the absurd extremity of his circumstances, the film becomes morbidly irresistible, with editors Kim Sang-beom and Kim Ho-bin maintaining the momentum as the stakes escalate. When tensions finally begin to boil over — most memorably in Man-soo’s visit to Gu Bummo’s home — the result is a string of action sequences that rank among not only the year’s but perhaps even the decade’s finest.
The success of “No Other Choice” hinges on keeping the audience empathetic toward Man-soo, even as his actions grow increasingly abhorrent. Chan-wook understands this.
Almost every character has a fully realized arc, and yet none feel underutilized. The two kids, for example, primarily function as cute caricatures that help us sympathize with their father, but the script — credited to Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee and Canadian actor-filmmaker Don McKellar — allows them, at times, to act as much more. Ri-one’s cello prodigy status becomes a clever motif, for example, while stepson Si-one’s criminal streak lands Man-soo in yet another hilariously improbable predicament.
But make no mistake: decisive and timely commentary lies just beneath these layers of irony and absurdism. It’s a film that has (rightfully) drawn comparisons to “Parasite” (2019), but given its tone and subject matter, it seems as much a meeting point between “Sorry to Bother You” (2018) and “Tokyo Sonata” (2008) as it does Bong Joon Ho’s best picture winner.
Regardless of comparisons, Chan-wook’s film — with its mind-blowingly inventive match cuts and distinctive compositions — is a wholly original work within a familiar canon. Though Chan-wook first began conceptualizing an adaptation of Westlake’s novel two decades ago, the final effort unmistakably engages with the rhetoric surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence — its coda confirms this, and then some. The film pulls no punches, and while the satire could have buried the message, it ultimately accomplishes the opposite.
In the end, the film centers a simple yet shrewd insight: A capitalist economy unavoidably coerces us into believing that our professional performance is equivalent to our self-worth, and so when we fail, we have ‘no other choice’ but to claw our way back to the top.
