It’s Bad Out There

Park Chan-wook’s ‘No Other Choice’ takes an ax to the job-search grind.

By Zosha MillmanFebruary 23, 2026

• Film

• Economics and Finance

“HOW CAN YOU go against the times?”

This is the question Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) asks during his final job interview in No Other Choice (2025), the latest film from Park Chan-wook. As he says it, he laughs, beaming with the confidence of a man who knows he’s crushed the competition. After having been unemployed for more than a year, his job search is finally reaching an end. Life is good. All it took was his soul, some light fraud, and a handful of strategic murders.

Anyone who has recently been unemployed can relate. The past year in particular was not kind to the job market. Thousands of people have been part of layoffs across industries, the latest high-profile instance being the gutting of The Washington Post, leaving January layoff plans at their highest global total since 2009. Secure employment no longer feels assured; in certain industries, it doesn’t even feel possible. As we know, everything is shitty now, but being on the market feels even worse than that.

In an odd twist of fate, I saw No Other Choice on my final day of unemployment, on the eve of starting a new gig five months after the previous publication I worked at was bought and decimated by the new owners, who decided they didn’t need about 95 percent of us (or our pesky union). No Other Choice is undoubtedly a tragedy, but I have to admit—the experience was perversely cathartic. Here I was, watching a movie whose protagonist is rendered so desperate by unemployment that he literally kills his competition. Anyone who has spent time browsing new positions on LinkedIn would understand: who wouldn’t kill to stop networking?

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No Other Choice starts relatively innocently, at least inasmuch as a story about a burgeoning serial killer can. At first, Man-su plans on killing just one man in order to steal his job. But at the last second he realizes that, even with that man gone, he will still have to interview for the position. To better his odds, he then decides to collect intel on his potential competition by soliciting résumés from a fake company, selecting competitive applicants, and offing them before even dispatching his initial target.

The story is based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, released in 1997. Westlake had written dozens of books before The Ax, and was dubbed the “Neil Simon of the crime novel” for the way he melded slapstick and one-liners with hard-boiled mystery. This sensibility pairs perfectly with Park Chan-wook, a uniquely gifted visual filmmaker who specializes in telling stories that find raw humor and lush humanity in unusually dire circumstances. Park first rose to prominence outside of South Korea with his Vengeance Trilogy. For most viewers, the trilogy was anchored by the twisted scheming of Oldboy (2003). Park established a reputation for depicting stark, brutal violence, artfully staged and momentously rendered. His earlier works, however, showed the dignity that carries through his entire filmography (even if they all still ended in despair), with films like Joint Security Area (2000) depicting friendship across the DMZ’s Bridge of No Return with humor and humanity.

Park first read The Ax 20 years ago, and five years later, he decided he had to adapt it. Thus began more than a decade of not making it: in 2012, he set it aside to direct his first English-language film, Stoker, stating at the time that he’d need to attract more investors to make The Ax the way he wanted. He scouted locations in the United States and Canada before the production fell apart, and he went off to direct the John le Carré series The Little Drummer Girl (2018) instead. At the Busan International Film Festival in 2019, Park described his Ax adaptation to the crowd as a “lifetime project”: he hoped to make the film his masterpiece.

The resulting combination of humor, humanity and despair does feel particularly apt for people trapped in a brutal, unfeeling capitalist system. Looking for work is just one of its most punishing rituals. But what else can you do? Communication becomes odd and unnatural. The process is full of empty chatter, and you suddenly become aware of how much gets said without really saying anything—a cover letter, LinkedIn advice, an empty platitude, a “quick reach out.” Connecting with people also becomes more fraught. At the start of my unemployment, for example, my laid-off colleagues and I initially swarmed LinkedIn like piranhas to share contacts, successes, dreams, and, depressingly often, letdowns. And then, slowly, people stopped sharing much at all. Peers who were still gainfully employed reached out to check in or catch up or “connect,” but when I reached out, I was often met with gobsmacking silence. The lot of us laid off in May chatted about whether to use AI to punch up résumés or engage with the job transition team our former company had provided for us. It turns out that service actually consisted of just having someone else use AI on your résumé and give the same pat advice you’d find anywhere else. How can you go against the times?

In that light, it’s not hard to see how a man like Man-su—already too proud to ask for help—could wind up feeling isolated and desperate. When you feel that exposed, merely seeking assistance can seem like a fatal blow.

Man-su feels that way even about his own wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin). And there’s a sense that she’s holding something back as well: Mi-ri puts on a brave face when Man-su tells her about his layoff, and only deflates—collapses, even!—once she’s off the phone. Aside from their discussions of how to cut back and their wounding fights, we rarely see them speak to each other directly or honestly. She chides him for being late; he makes fun of her boss and suspects her of an affair. She picks out a couple’s costume for them; he thinks she’s trying to make a fool of him. No matter how much they try, there’s just a gulf there—of pride, fear, hopelessness. Park’s camera only reinforces their distance. When Mi-ri opens the letter notifying the family that they may lose their house, the camera swivels in an ominous low-angle shot, pulling the film closer to the horror movie it might easily become.

Man-su has no friends and no real attachments to ground him beyond his family, whom he constantly thinks he’s letting down. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Man-su finds his strongest connections with other people when he’s in the middle of his murderous missions and trying to talk around something else. When stalking his second victim, he finds himself forced into conversation and speaks candidly about the challenges of raising a daughter whose life and development may actually depend on playing the cello, an expensive calling for any parent to tend. When he talks to his would-be victim, the angles are soft, each lost soul gently mirroring the other. The movie slows down, stripping away the ample tragedy and comedy of No Other Choice in favor of a somber connection between two men, down on their luck and eager for a break.

Perhaps the standout scene from the movie comes when Man-su is finally ready to pull the trigger on his first victim. He confronts the other man at home while he’s listening to a record. The man mistakes Man-su for his wife’s lover, and the two let loose on each other, explaining what they wish the other person could just understand. It’s a delightful farce: his target’s wife soon returns, and Man-su becomes a third wheel to his own crime. When she enters, Man-su is decked out in his instantly iconic killing outfit (maroon chest wader over a suit, with four layers of gloves on his gun hand), and the two men are forced to shout their conversation while Cho Yong-pil’s “Redpepper Dragonfly” blares over the speakers. In these moments, perhaps because of all the space for confrontation and distraction, Man-su finally finds a way to talk: about his victim’s shortcomings, the anxieties that mirror his own. The six-minute scene is a scramble, and it’s Park at his apex: stylish but deeply felt.

Over and over, the film emphasizes how Man-su could relate to the people around him if he just let his guard down. Park has said that he envisioned Man-su as a man of pride, too busy watching shadows dance on the walls of his masculinity to see his situation clearly. It’s hard to overstate how lucky he was to cast Lee Byung-hun as Man-su, though Park has jokingly complained about Lee’s approach to the role. At the Q and A following the film’s Aero Theatre screening, Park explained: “Byung-hun had too many questions for me. […] So what he would tell me are things like ‘I wouldn’t become a serial killer just because I got fired.’ So I had to keep telling him: ‘But this is not your story; this is a person who would become a serial killer because they got fired.’” Lee is loose, almost vulnerably cringe at times, like if Bugs Bunny were anchored by the laws of physics and deeply anxious about it.

Lee gives Man-su a smile like a Halloween costume, a grimace masquerading as something cheerier. As he continues through his mission, though, with more kills under his belt, his smile becomes more confident, and his actions more decisive. Such self-assurance would be all upside if it didn’t come at such a cost.

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A criticism often leveled against Americans is that we overidentify with our jobs. I’ll tell you personally that in the media, self and job are even harder to disentangle. All that time spent writing and thinking and refining—so much of the work feels personal that it’s almost impossible to unhook yourself from the product.

But again, what can you do? That principle is baked into No Other Choice’s very title, like a wall as slippery as it is unyielding. It’s the reason given when he and his colleagues are let go by the American company cutting costs at his paper mill (“I’m sorry, there’s no other choice”). It’s the quiet mantra Man-su whispers to himself before pulling a gun on a fellow down-on-his-luck job applicant (“No other choice; no other choice”). It’s part of the movie’s loudest betrayal—even worse than the murders—when Man-su convinces himself to break his sobriety to wear down his victim, despite knowing how much his sobriety means to his wife (“No other choice …”).

This isn’t actually true, of course. There is a choice. When writing the novel, Westlake said he wanted his book to highlight the difference between the Great Depression his parents weathered, however miserably, with company, compared to the “isolated” nature of the tech layoffs that were happening around him in the 1990s. But that strikes me as a choice too. I doubt there’s ever been a time when unemployment felt simple, when it was easy to feel so casually useless. Company isn’t an easy fix. My partner and I both lost our jobs in May. As a unit, we managed to navigate the situation together, but even then, we sometimes felt isolated when talking to anyone else. A simple question—“How have things been?”—was like a bubble we had to pop in order to get any oxygen in the room: Professionally, life sucked; beyond that, doing alright actually! We’ll let you know if there’s anything to know. How about you, how are you doing?

I know, I know: It’s foolhardy to overidentify with Man-su. Just as often as it mines his awkwardness for comedy, the film constantly frames his actions within the long arc of tragedy. As her husband digs a grave for one of his victims, Park overlays Mi-ri rolling over in bed as if into the hole. While Man-su drugs his final victim, the film cuts to Mi-ri on a swing pondering his actions; when it cuts back, the seat is still swinging but empty. As far as I know, those of us who were laid off this year fell more in line with Man-su’s victims: plowing through, trying to stay above a void of depression. Amid the tragic downfall, Man-su’s story does expose something real about the desperation that can set in: of course, murder is not a reasonable reaction to joblessness and dour economic prospects, but it can feel terrifyingly close when you’re left with such emptiness.

Just as it highlights that emptiness, No Other Choice, in Park’s knowing hands, turns technological isolation into text, constantly emphasizing the screens that “connect” us without bringing us closer. Man-su takes a video call from his wife in the middle of several compromising situations, including his final murder. By that point, she has figured out what he’s up to and is trying to get to him before it’s too late. But while her audio throughout the scene comes through crystal clear, his sounds staticky and processed, like listening in on a distant phone call. He’s too far gone; he can’t see the choices: You can choose to isolate. You can choose to tell the truth. You can choose to keep plugging away at job apps that might only be read by an AI screener. You can FaceTime your loving wife from a crime scene.

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In the end, No Other Choice has one more way to twist the knife: Man-su’s final interview lands him a job, though it isn’t the one he thought he was interviewing for. This paper company is looking for a foreman to oversee an AI-operated warehouse, one lone human among a nightmare ballet of automation. It’s the final trick promised by the title, with execs sorrowfully insisting that they simply must rely on robots instead of humans—“That’s the whole point of the system. No other choice.” When Man-su finally arrives for his first day of work, he cheers, and the film’s final shot is a pan up to the robotic movements in a dark warehouse. It’s a mirror to the ending of the opening scene, when Man-su’s family hug panned up to a brilliant orange sky. But in that moment, the sun was setting, and now automation is here to carry us into the next age. After all, how can you go against the times?