No Other Choice

The Severance Package

I get suspicious whenever a movie announces itself as a diagnosis of capitalism’s spiritual rot. Usually that means either a chilly lecture dressed as a corporate thriller or a miserable indie where everybody stares at overdue bills. Park Chan-wook’s *No Other Choice* goes another way. It wants to shove you down the stairs and laugh on the way down. Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel *The Ax*—and dedicated, fittingly, to Costa-Gavras, who adapted it before—Park updates the anxiety for 2025. This time the specter hovering over everything is artificial intelligence, coldly optimizing a paper-manufacturing business of all things. Into that nightmare steps Man-su, a middle manager booted aside after 25 years of loyal work. He loves his wife, his two children, and his golden retrievers. When the job market spits him back up, he decides the sensible thing is to start killing the other applicants.



That sounds bleak, and it is, but Park keeps twisting it toward something viciously funny. This is a filmmaker who understands escalation better than almost anyone, whether in the operatic revenge of *Oldboy* or the erotic maneuvering of *The Handmaiden*. Here, with cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, the visual control is still razor sharp, but the subject is deliberately pitiful. David Rooney in *The Hollywood Reporter* wrote that the pain of this desperate family man gets "short-changed in favor of wacky humor." I get the complaint. I also think that imbalance is the movie’s whole point. In a system that treats workers like busted equipment, absurdity stops being seasoning and becomes the main course. Murder starts to look like slapstick because the society around it is already grotesque.



One scene in particular has been rattling around in my head. Man-su breaks into a rival applicant’s house planning to kill him. He’s wearing oven mitts. The gun is wrapped in plastic. He turns up the stereo to cover the shot, only to wake the man instead. What follows isn’t a sleek thriller showdown. The two of them wind up bickering about the volume and, somehow, about marriage. The intended victim starts complaining about his wife; Man-su, in the middle of a home invasion, sincerely tells him he should try listening to her. Then the wife creeps up behind Man-su with a weapon, not realizing he had just defended her. The whole thing collapses into a pathetic, painful slapstick fight. Nobody looks cool. Nobody looks competent. They look like exhausted men making a disaster out of a living room.



None of it works without Lee Byung-hun. Most viewers probably know him now as the unnervingly still Front Man from *Squid Game*, someone who can take over a scene by barely moving. Park flips that weapon on its head. Here, Lee lets his handsome face sag into panic and sweat, and it’s startling. His Man-su has a drooping, anxious physicality that feels horribly plausible. He isn’t a monster in the abstract. He’s a man who has welded his self-worth to the paycheck that keeps Son Ye-jin’s wonderfully sharp wife comfortable and the dogs fed. I’m not sure *No Other Choice* fully nails the ending—the last act gets heavy with its own bitterness—but it absolutely lands as a portrait of a man clawing at a system that would not blink if he vanished. You leave laughing, then check your inbox and stop.