‘No Other Choice’ Viennale Review: Park Chan-wook Turns Capitalism into a Blood Sport

The phrase “savage capitalism” finds its truest audiovisual and, in more than one sense, literal expression in No Other Choice, the new film by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook — a pitch-black comedy about the limits the system itself forces people to cross when they find themselves left out, or on the verge of being left out. That’s how things work everywhere. And in South Korea, where being a loyal employee of the same company for a quarter of a century is taken as a gesture of trust and respect toward that very system, falling outside of it can be even worse. In fact, the same companies that lay you off even offer “self-esteem workshops” to help you cope with the void that follows.

But capitalism has its own rules, and no amount of self-help or labor organizing seems to make much difference anymore. One day you’re given an award and a prized eel to grill at home; the next, you’re being forced to sell your house, give away your dogs, and — horror of horrors — cancel your Netflix subscription. “There was no other choice,” Mansu (Lee Byung-hun) is told when he tries to protest to the new American owners of the paper company that has just fired him along with many others. A dark future looms — for them and for many more — one that turns out to be even harsher than expected.

“You’ll find another job in three months,” they promise. But no — it doesn’t happen. Mansu searches for more than a year and ends up working as a warehouse stocker. His anxious, calculating wife Miri (Son Yejin) has done the math: they’ll have to sell the old family home where Mansu grew up and which he helped restore, and also cancel the tennis and dance lessons. Their older son Si-one (Kim Woo Seung) and younger daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul) — he glued to his computer, she to her cello, both barely communicative — will have to say goodbye to their dogs, their friends, their comforts. They won’t end up on the street, but they’ll have to start living in a way they never imagined.

Yet Mansu refuses to give up. After a failed job interview at another paper mill, he discovers that the system of “staff elimination” has another, more literal meaning: eliminating the competition — the other candidates vying for the same job. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the film is adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, previously brought to the screen by Costa-Gavras twenty years ago. Now, the protagonist’s brutal descent into hell in order to stay inside the system feels even more timely. Companies fire more ruthlessly than ever, the paper industry faces a bleak future, and artificial intelligence combined with robotics has made many of these jobs obsolete. And that’s not even mentioning another modern scourge that also plays a role here: influencers.

Told as a progressively darker and more violent comedy, No Other Choice puts its clumsy, desperate protagonist on the verge of becoming a criminal. Park abandons the formal precision and meticulous control of his earlier work to create a freer, wilder, more desperate film — one that mirrors the raw energy, rage, and confusion of its main character. With an agonizing toothache and a knack for getting into trouble, Mansu is clearly not the ideal man for the job. And that becomes obvious soon enough.

Thanks to the success of Parasite and Squid Game, Korean cinema and television have become synonymous with stories of social ascent and downfall, where survival depends on brutal life-or-death games and characters are ready to let go of anyone’s hand to save their own. Park’s film operates in the same territory but in a more anarchic, explosive, and less calculated way — as if the years since Bong Joon-ho’s film had only deepened the collective anxiety and despair of those who feel not just excluded from the system but deprived of its most advertised privileges.

The film manages to be both very funny and deeply unsettling without ever — or almost ever — becoming gratuitously cruel. Mansu doesn’t plan to kill the company bosses but rather his peers, the ones competing with him for the same position. Yet, in his mind — shaped and dehumanized by decades of corporate logic — that’s the only option left. And it’s no coincidence that this reasoning mirrors much of today’s political reality: fewer and fewer people want to challenge those at the top because we’ve all been programmed — by algorithms, social media, political campaigns, advertising — to see the enemy not above us but beside us, in those who share our same precarious situation. That’s where the film’s sense of anguish collides with its humor. The world it depicts isn’t so different from the one we live in, just less subtle.

Stories built on a “survival of the fittest” logic always run the risk of being problematic, of ending up celebrating those who embrace that mindset. Park ensures his film never crosses that line. The rivals Mansu believes he must eliminate are as desperate, anxious, and, in some cases, even more pitiful than he is. There’s no pleasure in completing the mission, no thrill in the violence. Mansu is just another victim of a system built on elimination, and his great failure is not realizing — or not being able — to step off the machinery he grew up believing in.

With razor-sharp humor, a handful of unforgettable moments where violence and farce merge in perfect, chaotic harmony, and a furious energy aimed squarely at the anxieties of the present, Park Chan-wook delivers what might well be the most complete film of his career. No Other Choice feels at once liberated and furious, as if its director had decided to dismantle every remaining illusion about stability, merit, or progress in the modern world. There’s an untamed vitality in every frame, a rage that runs beneath the laughter, and a compassion that refuses to vanish even in the darkest corners. The result is a savage comedy about the delirium of a society that devours its own and convinces itself, again and again, that there was never any other choice.