Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is the latest addition to Korea’s abundant film tradition of the thriller-cum-class critique. Much like fellow canon member Parasite, watching No Other Choice feels like some kind of oxygen-deprivation experience.
The film’s male lead, Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), is on a frenetic quest to regain employment in the paper industry after falling victim to layoffs threshed by the scythe foreign capital. When Man-soo is fired, he is cleaved not only from petty bourgeois society but also from the niceties that entail a comfortable salary.
In a layoff-hungry world where human labour is slowly subsumed by AI, the strictures of the labour market Man-soo finds himself in are all too resonant. Dishearteningly, Man-soo’s solution is not to target the system but rather to target his fellow workers.
True, too, that our labour market is structured so as to force the masses to fight tooth and nail for any sliver of opportunity. Unfortunately, Chan-wook doesn’t challenge this ideology by redirecting Man-soo’s anger at the vicious system of layoffs demanded by deindustrialization and the movements of foreign capital. Man-soo sees the tumescence of his financial disorder not in the executive class, who are the harbingers of the worker’s doom, but rather in his fellows. What Chan-wook does dispel, though, is the comforting myth that less job applicants means more jobs. The condensation of work in our age demands that when an employee dies their job dies with them, and Chan-wook displays this beautifully in the final scene of the film, where Man-soo singularly manages the AI in a factory that previously employed many.
A political outcry about the speculative and cruel economics of our times, No Other Choice should be on every 2025 watch list.
Feature Image: courtesy of TIFF.
