No Other Choice

Released 2025. Director: Park Chan-wook

COMING SECOND PLACE AT A JOB INTERVIEW IS AS GOOD as being dead last. Only one candidate gets the offer and everyone else will be rejected, doesn't matter how close you come to that finish line. These are soul-crushing experiences. Don't get me started on personal anecdotes for I might just put a hex on some dingbats. The dark abyss of prolonged unemployment is tackled in No Other Choice, a black comedy about a man who devises an ingenious method to get the job he wants.

If you've seen the massively popular Squid Game on Netflix you'll recognise Lee Byung-hun. He's the guy behind the mask who runs the deadly competition, a cold and calculated manipulator who orchestrates, for the purpose of entertainment, the deaths of the ravenous and desperate who have no other choice.

The coin is flipped here as Lee plays an unemployed man named Man-su who finds himself pushed to a corner and resorts to drastic measures. Man-su has a wife and two kids that rely on him, mortgage on a big house, a pair of labradors to feed and a level of lifestyle they've grown accustomed to. His daughter's cello lessons alone costs a small fortune.

Trouble is, Man-su has spent decades in a specialised field of paper manufacturing and jobs at his level are hard to come by. When an opportunity opens up, the competition is insane.

The job market is cruel to middle-age applicants in the best of times and the movie depicts the ruthless reality facing this demographic, no longer possessing the desirability of youth and scrambling for the limited space in upper middle management. Man-su's twenty-plus years of experience as an engineer counts for little and the inane interviews are dispiriting and distracting. From the depth of his despair an idea is born. He would bait his closest competition and eliminate them one by one, clearing the way for himself. In other words, to get a job the man becomes a serial killer.

Lee doesn't play the role as a psycho, more a criminally resourceful handyman than a meticulous assassin. There's a measure of scruples mixed with a slight touch of comic helplessness in his acts, especially at the start.

His chosen targets are similarly desperate. The first victim gets a poignant subplot and the way his life comes apart after losing his job is a sad affair. The man's wife's infidelity and involvement in his eventual murder turns Man-su's plan into a tragedy far more than he had bargained for. With hearing compromised by loud music blaring on the stereo, the man mistakes Man-su for his wife's lover while Man-su berates him for not heeding his wife's advice about looking for a job outside his industry, then the wife walks in and a gun goes off. The 3-way struggle that erupts is tense, hilarious and pathetic all at the same time, a standout sequence.

From this point on, the depiction of Man-su's serial killing is uneven. The third victim is dispatched in a fastidious and methodical process, involving painstaking planning, plenty of one-on-one time, props and considerable physical exertion. Prior to that, however, the second victim simply gets shot after a brief interaction, denying him the deeper sympathy that arise from the other two victims. Regardless, Park still manages to make it clear that these men, whether jobless or earning a wage in over-qualified disheartening work, are miserable and missing their self-esteem.

Park maintains a fine balance between the dramatic and the thriller aspects but as a black comedy, the movie could've been darker. The plot is loose in a few places – the predicament with Man-su's daughter as a music prodigy feels under-developed, his nagging toothache is dealt with bizarrely out of context, the way the cops explain their speculation (to a person of interest, no less) strains belief.

I couldn't say how this movie compares with Le Couperet from 2005 directed by Costa-Gavras (to whom No Other Choice is dedicated), or The Ax, the book by Donald Westlake on which both movies are based. It does, however, remind me of Kind Hearts and Coronets, a 1949 comedy in which a man murders eight heirs to move himself up the line of succession to dukedom. If you have never seen it, I encourage you to check it out if only to see Alec Guinness play all the eight roles.

No Other Choice is technically very polished. Nonetheless when viewed alongside Park's other movies, this is not on the same level of sophistication as say, The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave or the seminal Oldboy, in terms of the exquisite craftsmanship and the intricacy of characterisation, or the way the movie flows, feels and surprises.

No Other Choice has a happy ending for its protagonist, though it's also a foreboding sign that more and more of us will find ourselves out of work and competing not with fellow job-seekers but the increasingly ubiquitous A.I. No Other Choice will in retrospect be seen as a period comedy when in the good old days people could actually bump off other people to get to the front of the line. But how do you kill A.I. to get its job?

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