Abstract
Based on: Park Chan-wook No Other Choice South Korea: Moho Film
"Park Chan-wook’s interweaving of ludicrous villainy, emotional maximalism and Hitchcockian devices in No Other Choice (2025) belies a simple storyline: After being laid off by the papermaking company that he has served for decades with decoration and pride, a middle-aged man—Man-su (played with astonishing wickedness and guile by Lee Byung-hun)—is exiled into the job market, where he finds himself having ‘no other choice’ but to kill all his competitors to be able to land a new position in the same field. Regardless of whether this marks the director’s aesthetic best (given earlier works such as Oldboy [2003] and The Handmaiden [2016]), the film’s ideological critique is loud and clear: Neoliberal capitalism, built on the meritocratic determinism of social Darwinian competition, is turning job markets into battlefields where affective relations are distilled into a ‘kill-or-be-killed’ dynamic."