(A Critique by Ralph Leonard)
In capitalism, the only worse thing than being exploited is not being exploited. Joan Robinson’s maxim hits on a simple, yet brutal truth. Being ‘exploited’, that is working for a living, is how we make our livelihood. Participating in cooperative labour with others – is how we participate in society. Thus, being thrown out of your job is like being thrown out of society. You’re condemned to brute animal survival on the margins. Save for finding work again, being unemployed is a death sentence.
Capitalism’s ceaseless self-revolutionising of industry means machines make workers – though not work as Max Horkheimer reminds us – increasingly superfluous. So, workers must compete with each other for fewer and fewer jobs. This isn’t the vision of competition in bourgeois society posed by Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, articulated before the industrial revolution, where private vice translates into public virtue, because this competition effectively is a form of social cooperation where society benefits in the end, based on the presumption that there’s a place for everyone in the economy. No, this is rather a destructive, anti-social kind of competition where the ill of unemployment is a permanent, and not merely a temporary, reality. Competing for a job under these conditions is a fight for your life, your family’s lives, your children’s future. Those you are facing off against aren’t simply adversaries, but enemies, combatants who must be defeated. Their gain will be your loss. Those who do not work shall not eat – and eventually will die. It’s that simple.
No Other Choice, Park Chan-Wook’s latest entry in an already splendid oeuvre, ventures into this primal struggle for existence in a wholly literalized way. Partially adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel ‘The Ax,’ for an era dominated by anxieties of workforce supplantation by AI, it follows Man-Soo (played by Lee Byung-hun), a low-level manager at a paper company, whose stable and homely life is suddenly upended by unexpected unemployment.
When we first meet Man-Soo, it is in happier times. He seemingly lives a stable, homely petit-bourgeois existence. He has his dutiful wife (played by Son Ye-jin, whose graceful beauty makes it very easy to develop a crush on her), two beautiful children, Si-one and Ri-one, two dogs; a wonderful nuclear family. Uncommon in South Korea, where high rise apartments are customary in such a densely populated land, he owns his own detached suburban house with the car, the picket fence and the rest of it. This snapshot of family, ownership and status is what Man-Soo ties his identity to.
Indeed, Man-Soo seems to be the epitome of what William Graham Sumner called “The Forgotten Man”. The productive, hardworking, virtuous citizen who works, raises his family, pays taxes and minds his business. The sort of person ignored by reformers, yet whose hard-earned fruits of his labour will be called upon – or exploited if you will – by the state to pay for their schemes that won’t even solve the problem they intend to.
But after American capitalists take over his company, Solar Paper, budget cuts are made. Man-Soo, along with many others, are unceremoniously made redundant. Twenty-five years of loyal service to his company just gone like that. Months later, as the severance pay cushion withers away and the search for a new job is fruitless, Man-Soo and Lee-Miri have no choice but to impose austerity on their family. Miri has to relinquish her expensive tennis hobby and take up a part-time job at a dentist’s office. They can barely pay for their (mostly) mute daughter’s cello lessons. The dogs are sent over to live with their parents. Furniture is put up for sale. Even Netflix is cancelled. It’s seriously considered that they might have to sell their house, which was Man-Soo’s childhood home that he bought back and refurbished himself: and live in an apartment, just like most South Koreans. When it does go on the market, Man-Soo’s switch is flipped. Something must be done to stop this abject decline into proletarianization.
But Man-Soo is stubbornly insistent on getting a job in paper manufacturing again. He refuses to adapt and try to get a different job, as his wife tepidly suggests. Capitalism’s creative destruction demands a work force with a ‘flexible’ skill set that can be slotted in as needed. But Man-Soo refuses to change. His identity is intertwined with being an industry insider, a ‘paper man’. He was so attached to his job, it gave him not just money, but status, and dignity; or at least the illusion of it. The problem for Man-Soo is the declension in status. He can no longer be the ‘provider’ for his family, and that is driving him mad. As he says to his wife, “paper has fed me for 25 years. Honey, I have no other choice”.
As his job search still leads nowhere, he comes to the sordid conclusion that he must take matters into his own hands to get back what he has lost. Rather than being a bog standard “Eat the Rich” satire, No Other Choice takes an intriguing perspective. Another version of this story would have Man-Soo taking revenge against the corporate bosses and bureaucrats that made him unemployed. The film cleverly tricks you into assuming this is what the narrative will be. At one moment Man-Soo almost drops a potted plant on the head of the boss of a company who rejected his job application. Just before he is about to drop it, he has second thoughts and considers a different approach: rather than take out the boss, eliminate the competition to increase his chances of getting the paper job he really wants.
Thus, Man-Soo’s violence is horizontal not vertical. He literally guns for his fellow workers who are on his level, who have the same skill-set. Park Chan-Wook is posing a critique of petit-bourgeois precarity. Through Man-Soo’s struggle, Park highlights the cruelty of capitalist competition, where structural pressures leave atomised individuals feeling there is no alternative but violence. In his desperate search for work in a declining paper industry, Man-Soo turns his job hunt into a miserable, wallowing in resentment…self-pity and scarcity, not opportunity and hope.
To get what he wants Man-Soo develops a devious idea. He sets up a phoney recruitment advert in a paper industry trade magazine. Using the personal information that these trusting applicants will send him, he will murder them all, thus eliminating the competition.
There are three main adversaries on Man-Soo’s hitlist. They are his human obstacles, but each of them are mirrors of Man-Soo.
Like Man-Soo, Bummo, his first victim, says to his wife, who harangues him about not finding a new career, that “paper has fed me for 25 years”. He’s a man with a stubborn conservative temperament, very much preferring analog over digital. He listens to vinyl, uses cash only and writes on paper. He doesn’t want to change and doesn’t see why he should abandon the old ways that still work, even though the pressure of capitalist accumulation demands that he must, or he will find himself on the human scrap heap along with the many others.
Like Man-Soo, Bummo is also a hopeless lush after he too was thrown out of the paper industry. Yet, as soon as a new opportunity to get back in arises, he is able to kick his addiction as the only purpose he had in the world is his once again. In one of the funniest, and finely composed, slapstick murder scenes of the film, while Man-Soo has Bummo at gun point he admonishes him for not listening to his wife about finding a new career (the same advice his wife gave him but didn’t want to listen to). The hypocrisy is obviously glaring.
The humour is, wonderfully, the most surprising element of this film. I found it genuinely hilarious that Yoo consistently and willingly answered every facetime call from his wife at the worst possible times. No Other Choice brilliantly balances wit with atrocity, farce with brutality. And this is evidence through how the film is structured in its tone. The first half of the film employs bright lights and expressive colours. The second half has more darkly lit scenes and a muted colour palette. This subtle difference not only showcases the distinct tones of the two halves of the films but are also an indication of Man-Soo and his family’s moral declension.
After Man-Soo murders his first target: the film begins to transition away from the wacky and the comedic into a tense thriller that is more characteristic of Park Choon-Wok’s films. By his second target, he’s no longer a floundering fool who hesitates at every turn; he’s learned from his mistakes and can be an efficient killer. On his third murder, he has completed his transition to a cold-blooded murder machine that has lost whatever ounce of humanity he had remaining within him.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world in Man-Soo’s mind. However, in his desperate attempt to become a cog in the capitalist machine again to regain the financial stability he so craves, he loses what made him sympathetic in the first place. His marriage has been evacuated of the honest romance, which was presented in the beginning almost like something ripped straight out of a fantasy tale.
‘No Other Choice’ is a film, as the title suggests, about choices, or choices not made, or the lack of choice. The company had no other choice but to let him go. Man-Soo had no other choice but to eliminate his competition. His wife had no other choice but to go along with it. His daughter has no other choice to gain independence besides playing music. The capitalist corporation has no other choice but to automate everything. Or do they? Man-Soo certainly had the option to go for a different career other than paper, but his pride, his stubbornness won’t allow it. To say that he was ‘forced’ into a campaign of murder and cruelty by the ‘structural’ forces of capitalism seems like a delusional rationalisation of the choices he did make.
The paradox of capitalist society, to echo Marx from the 18th Brumaire, is we certainly make choices, but not in circumstances of our own making. But Man-Soo, and most people in the real world, cannot imagine that the current circumstances can be changed in the service of the freedom of society. The most that could be imagined, certainly in most films, is some version of a conservative, petit-bourgeois critique of capitalism in the service of the ‘dignity of work’ against the Luciferean colonisation of the machines. Nothing more transformative, that goes beyond the horizon of bourgeois right. The reality is, in current circumstances, all workers are condemned, necessarily, to compete for the scraps of capitalist society in order to survive. To be the lone worker, like Man-Soo, is to manage to fend for oneself, overseeing the machines, but at the cost of one’s own bourgeois humanist dignity.
The irony of No Other Choice is people are competing, shedding blood even, for a job that’s been colonised by machines to create an analog product – paper – that only has utility to humans in an exclusively offline way. While No Other Choice is perhaps not in the higher echelons alongside Oldboy and The Handmaiden, it was still a wonderful, humorous movie that got progressively better. Not a single moment of it was boring. It is easily one of the best films I’ve seen in 2026. That it has been snubbed for the major awards, is disappointing to say the least.
In any case, hopefully it will be remembered as a modern classic in years to come.
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