James Y. Lee
For a long time now, celebrated South Korean master Park Chan-Wook has found extensive renown for his tales of vengeance. The earliest stretch of his career—ranging from the early ’90s to most of the 2000s—is marked with various stories of those scorned by violence, and wish nothing but to return that violence onto their oppressors. You have Oldboy‘s Oh Dae-su, kidnapped and held captive for 15 years and tasked to find out the reason for his captivity in five days. You have Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance in their respective films: the former becomes the center of an ever-expanding web of torment after his ailing sister falls under need of a kidney transplant, and the latter is also the victim of a wrongful conviction via the legal system, falsely accused of murdering a young boy. No wonder that, for a time, this theme was the most central thing Park was known for, as those three films even made up a de facto Vengeance Trilogy, dubbed that way by their reception, and seemingly not yet embraced by Park himself.
In recent years, it’s become clear that Park is gradually diverting himself from featuring vengeance as a central theme in his works—films like The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave have taken on a substantially more elegant kind of stylistic bent, not to mention a notably more romantic one. Even the extent to which he portrays brutal acts of violence or graphic sexuality seems to have toned down in severity. In contrast to the hammer-induced mutilations of Oldboy, the relatively sparse bloodletting of Decision to Leave‘s central murder cases could not be further from what pre-2010 expectations for what Park’s filmography would have looked like.
And yet, for the past several years, Park has teased the arrival of an adaptation of a novel he’s long been interested in—Donald Westlake’s The Ax. Published in 1997, the novel reads like an eerily prescient tale of the woes of corporate downsizing that have dominated much of today’s business discourse, what with rampant conversations about corporate mergers and their resulting layoffs dominating financial headlines over the past few years post-COVID. In that novel, a man named Burke Devore, a middle-aged middle-class paper mill manager, is laid off—axed—from his position after years of service. In his pursuit to take on a new position in a the same industry, he procedurally begins to hunt down and kill seven competitors who are on the verge of taking the job that he’s vying for. It may not be vengeance that he’s seeking, but the target of his violence is misguided; it’s not his competitors, but the system that forced him into this place of desperation.
Though Park may have done some meaningful work as of late in the English-speaking world of film and TV—with works like Stoker, The Little Drummer Girl, and The Sympathizer garnering attention—No Other Choice, his most recent feature film and the culmination of his efforts to adapt The Ax, translates the corporate woes of Westlake’s novel directly into South Korea’s cutthroat job market in 2025. It’s almost the perfect choice of source material and director—here is a filmmaker deeply honed into the rhythms of how people choose to act under unbearable duress, and the frequently violent measures they’ll take to either escape their circumstances or punish the people who’ve put them there. With this latest film, violence is in service of both of those aims, as that duress is nothing short of the horrors of our deeply corporatized and increasingly limiting job market, where unbearable desperation becomes a deliberate component of its design.
Lee Byung-hun—fresh off of having an internationally thriving year with his appearances in KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game—gets his first opportunity in quite some time to truly demonstrate his chops as a homegrown, South Korean dramatic performer. Here, he’s Park Man-su rather than Burke Devore, a similarly middle-aged, substantially more upper-middle-class paper factory manager living in seemingly untouchable comfort. The last time most audiences will have seen a South Korean residence as large as the one he lives in will likely have been in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, owned by the rich faction of that particular narrative tapestry.
The first time we see him, he’s enjoying a backyard barbecue with eel sent to him by his company, Solar Paper, sent as a gesture of gratitude for over 25 years of service. His wife, Mi-ri (Son Yejin), as well as his two children, Si-one (Kim Woo-seong) and Ri-one (Choi So-yul), are there with him in celebration—the former is Man-su’s somewhat rebellious stepson, and the latter is a neurodivergent cello prodigy who only speaks when repeating things she’s already heard before. It’s the kind of ideally familial occasion so picturesquely idyllic that Man-su says out loud what most people watching may already be thinking, set to the backdrop of a wonderful sunset shining at a perfect angle onto the family home—“I’ve got it all.”
But, of course, no Park protagonist who thinks this way stays in that place for very long. The two titles that make up the bedrock of this story—The Ax and No Other Choice—both rear their ugly heads at Solar Paper. Not long after, it’s soon revealed that a mass layoff is taking place as a result of an American buyout, and Man-su is among the first batch of loyal workers to go. The mere presence of Americans in this decision alone reminds Man-su that Koreans use “off with your head!” / “너 모가지야!” when firing employees—and that in America, they say, of course, that “you’ve been axed!” And when Man-su and several other employees run into the white businessmen responsible for their layoffs, they tell the workers straightforwardly: “We had no other choice.” The eel gift from earlier becomes, in essence, what it was eerily mistaken for moments earlier by Man-su’s kids—a snake that’s come around to bite them, a notice of termination neatly packaged with a written message of gratitude.
Man-su promises to his family that it’ll only take him three months to find steady managerial employment. It soon takes him over 13. He takes up a lower-paying gig in retail, while his family begins to downsize on their life; that means less ingredients in their meals, no Netflix subscription, no more regular dance classes for Mi-ri, and even the departure of their two Golden Retrievers, cheekily named Ri-two and Si-two. Even their house—Man-su’s childhood home, in fact, which he barely managed to reclaim after years upon years of hard work—comes under threat of being sold. Their mortgage is about to default, and unless Man-su takes quick action, the family will have to sell it off to someone else. While No Other Choice is crucially never a tale about poverty—unlike, for instance, the Kims in Parasite, this family is never at risk of losing a roof over their heads or food to feed themselves—it becomes clear very fast that the story it’s conveying is one where dignity and identity get irretrievably tied up with class status. To people like Man-su, who’ve trudged their way up the middle-class to attain and luxuriate in that level of comfort, a threat this significant to that status’s stability amounts to a total spiritual death.
Physical death follows not long after—or, at the very least, the threat of it. As Man-su gets word of a managerial position at a prestigious company called Moon Paper, remarkably similar to his previous work at Solar, Man-su creates a job posting for a fake paper company to get a sense of who his competitors are among the “applicants” who demonstrate their interest for Moon. Among them, he chooses three who have a solid shot at the Moon position; Gu Bum-mo (Lee Sung-min), Cho Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), and Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon). As his resolve to obtain this new position hardens—for the sake of reclaiming his dignity, to regain the respect of a family he feels he’s already lost—Man-su tells himself, with the same force of the self-reassuring mnemonics repeated to him at an unemployment support group, that he has “no other choice” but to kill these three competitors. As grim as that may sound, this is by far Park’s most comedically adept film yet, frequently tinged with narrative beats of slapstick comedy that rip open the absurdity of Man-su’s murderous quest. Countless sequences here are littered with moments of well-timed misunderstandings and over-earnestness that put on display quintessentially human flaws—so that it can start to rip them away once Man-su internalizes the capitalist ways of efficiency.
The competitors Man-su wants to kill are such uniquely distinct people in their own right—and Man-su learns more about them in his desire to kill them off than any cursory examination of their résumés will ever meaningfully provide. Lee Sung-min’s work as the frequently drunk Bum-mo is itself an astonishingly convincing portrayal of a man turning to alcoholism while failing to cope with unemployment’s seeming blow to his dignity. And yet, the real surprise here is not just in Bum-mo’s wallowing alcoholic impotence, but also in his peeved, infidelitous wife, A-ra, who’s played by Yeom Hye-ran with seething frustration and overzealous longing for the golden days of her marriage. Here, this fraught couple, on the verge of destroying each other—Bum-mo for his pride in trying to continually find work in a dying industry, A-ra for trying and failing via misguided methods to wake her husband up to his thick-headed stubbornness—is one of the film’s earliest sources of humor and dramatic irony. Once Man-su inserts himself into the equation to remove Bum-mo from the competition, however, these tensions all lead to an breathtakingly staged setpiece of motion, revelation, fury, and violence that’s one of the best displays ever for Park’s directorial talents.
And even still, the competitors Man-su wants to kill also reflect shades of his own struggles and strife. Man-su and Mi-ri exist in a marriage on the verge of landing in the same amount of tension and hot water as Bum-mo and A-ra’s—with the threat of infidelity also looming over Mi-ri as she catches the eye of a young local dentist, all while growing dangerously privy to uncovering Man-su’s scheme. And when it comes to Man-su’s other targets, each of them make it clear that the task of taking them out will come at a price, either for Man-su’s conscience or his physical well-being. Si-jo—who’s heartbreakingly played with a sort of trained servile, corporatized compassion by Cha Seung-won—has a daughter of his own, much like Si-one, working in retail for a shoe store in order to provide for his family in the interim. The most venomous of the bunch, Seon-chul, is played with a delectably pathetic edge by Park Hee-soon, and also the one among Man-su’s targets who we happen to see the most of. Fresh out of a divorce and with a thriving Instagram Reels career, he’s a man who mocked Man-su earlier on in his job search, making it clear that Man-su’s attempt on his life may be, if anything else, the one most driven by explicit vengeance.
It’s a testament to the film’s screenplay—notably the first Park film in years to not have been co-written by longtime collaborator Jeong Seo-kyeong—that a story juggling a cast this large still has room to layer itself so densely with symbolism and motifs. Literary in both their construction and incorporation, it’s through those details that this film finds the space and capacity to truly sing and edify audiences upon rewatch. Snakes emerge in conversation and literally at multiple points—venomous or not, cannibalizing or otherwise. The gun that Man-su wields to try and kill off the competition is North-Korean-made, wielded by his father in the Vietnam War, and legally out-of-place when considering just how gun-controlled South Korea is in contrast to the country that forced the circumstances of Man-su’s unemployment. Subplots of theft and infidelity further inform the fragility of the ideals these characters have set for themselves. And for someone who knows how to make his way around the mass-production of high-quality paper, the greenhouse that Man-su keeps in the backyard of his home demonstrates just how effective he is at taking care of a wide variety of bonsai trees—a trick that comes into harrowing re-use at a point later on in the story.
Lee Byung-hun’s work as Man-su is this film’s anchoring force, charging the character with a kind of bumbling desperation, where the direness of his attempted trail of murder is constantly contrasted by the front of civility he longs to establish, and the absurdity of just how frequently it falls apart. To that end, we have a wonderfully charming Son Ye-jin in a stunning turn as Mi-ri—someone whose tolerances for staying committed to a marriage on ice start to crack, yet still maintains her own conscience as Man-su’s begins to erode, and whose front of civility thus takes a more paranoid, helpless form. Punctuated with some of the most exciting formal gestures in terms of editing, movement, and transitions we’ve seen since Decision to Leave—with major kudos to editors Kim Sang-bum and Kim Ho-bin, as well as cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung—Park’s film gives us unusual access into the bonds that tie these characters together, as well as the states of mind they exist in. The sum of these incredibly well-oiled, hand-refined parts makes for a formally stimulating experience that supplements the intense amount of detail already present in its screenplay.
There’s something especially pointed about the release of a movie like this in this current hour, where economic inequality remains sharply on the rise, and job security grows increasingly uncertain as automation and generative AI begin to threaten both creative and technical industries alike. In an era where rapidly emerging technological developments are rendering specific industries and modes of work all but completely extinct, Park’s specific genre-thriller exercise in No Other Choice—where extremity seems rational, where the satirical feels oddly resonant and grounded—feels especially piercing for a world slowly radicalizing in the face of growing awareness about the inequity of our new world order. One of the film’s most pivotal final images—trees being shredded by log debarkers—is one of the bleakest shots in a filmography whose most popular entry is Oldboy, perhaps because at this point in modern history, we’ve slowly come to recognize that we’re about to be torn apart in nigh on the same way. Forced to recognize each other as threats to our dignity under the watch of an economic world order that’s deliberately tied our worth to our employment, no wonder we all act as though we have no other choice.
