Park Chan-Wook’s latest film, “No Other Choice,” is an unflinching, bitingly funny portrayal of the moral depredation brought on by scarcity. Man-su, the film’s embattled protagonist, has lost his longtime job at a paper factory. He’s so desperate to get a new job in the same industry that he begins murdering his competitors.
The U.S. release of this Korean film resonates in a moment when America has its highest rate of unemployment since 2021 and the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings is on the rise. Not only that, but highly profitable corporations like Amazon and Salesforce are laying people off and slowing hiring, expecting that artificial intelligence will do that same work for less costs than an actual human.
Americans are worried. One 2025 Pew study found that a majority of us saw the risks of A.I. to society as high, while another found that about half of workers were anxious about the effects of A.I. use in the workplace, and roughly a third thought it would lead to fewer job opportunities for them.
All this suits the owners of companies just fine. After the pandemic years of a tight job market and workers getting paid more, the playing field is looking brutal. Sarah Thankam Mathews, in an article in The Cut about the “humiliation ritual” of applying for jobs, notes that a young person now may expect to change jobs 12 to 15 times in her life. Precarity stalks the jobs once thought of as safe, and the cutthroat atmosphere affects even those who still have a job.
In his book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Cory Doctorow details how mass firings at tech companies like Google eroded worker power, including the ability to thwart the company’s own unscrupulous initiatives from within. The threat of firing acts “as a powerful disciplinary force on workers, changing their posture from ‘I won’t enshittify that product I missed my mother’s funeral to ship, and you can’t make me’ to ‘Whatever you say, boss.’”
Mr. Park, whose previous films include “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance,” is well suited to this tale of cruel circumstances, adapted from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax.” “After slaving for 25 years, they gave me 25 minutes to clear out,” Man-su says, running after the car of a line manager at Moon Paper, the company where he hopes to be hired.
Man-su’s victims, like their killer, have also been fired after corporate restructuring, and have attended similar workshops, like one where a cheery woman with a headset has former employees tap the sides of their heads and chant affirmations: “I am a good person!” and “In three months, I will be hired again!”
Scenes like these capture an essential dissonance at the heart of the working world. We want work to provide meaning and purpose — or at the very least, to provide us with the ability to support ourselves (ideally without compromising our deepest ethical values.) But seen from the other side, workers and their time are simply material inputs that can be squeezed and cut in any way that suits investors. The tension between these expectations sets the stage for rude awakenings, in which companies reveal just how much more they value efficiency over human lives.
It doesn’t exactly make for a respectful relationship. Early on in the film, a shot of Man-su hugging his family in front of his soon-to-be-unaffordable house fades directly into one of cardboard boxes being violently thrown into a hydrapulper at the paper factory. The same company that once promised Man-su that he’d have a job for life (as long as he didn’t join a union) has fired him without thought, throwing him away like so much recyclable material.
Chronic job insecurity undermines any chance of solidarity. It reduces the horizon of struggle to one of personal survival. For an individual trying to make ends meet, there is often “no other choice” but to accept self-abasement. Other people become objects blocking the way to freedom.
This view goes beyond the material damages of unemployment. It threatens aspects of the heart and soul. “No Other Choice” demonstrates the tragedy of a once-morally-intact character who so fully internalizes the ruthlessness of a system that he believes he has no other choice than to kill his fellow unemployed. “The end justifies the means,” recites the protagonist in Mr. Westlake’s “The Ax.” “Like the C.E.O.s, I have nothing to feel sorry for.”
At the end of the day, however, most of us are not C.E.O.s. And neither are we willing to be cardboard boxes for the hydrapulper. We are human beings with ideals that have proven curiously stubborn.
Even when workers are seen from the top as nothing but labor time, we workers — no matter what we do — must still make meaning inside our lives to survive. And despite the ongoing attempt to rid us of that desire, we still value and deserve things like stability and respect. The film’s title and recurring phrase invite us to ask what, in fact, the other choice would be.
For the companies, it’s true: There is no alternative to pleasing investors. But for us, there is a choice: not to succumb to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, absorbing the anti-human values of a game that benefits so very few. The people who actually do the work have a right to the conversation about what purposes work serves in our lives and in society, beyond the brute measure of efficiency.
Yet this is a choice that can only be imagined and accessed on a collective level. As a young worker tells Mathews for her article in The Cut, “If more of us stop accepting bad terms, we might see the strength we actually have, instead of being pitted against each other.” History provides countless versions of this lesson: The power to say no, to make the choice that is not presented, requires large groups of people to take on risk together, whether that’s in unions or through less formal means.
Adapting this old truth to the technological present is no easy task. And yet, the alternative is untenable. The current balance of power has people reconfiguring themselves to the ever-increasing speed of corporate whims. Our collective ability to decide what work should mean takes time and space, and this time and space can only be the fragile product of mutual commitment. It’s the image of the future that appears when we take off the blinders of individualism. Whatever we do, we should each reject the lie that all of this is inevitable. There is always another choice.
If we ignore collective action, our individual choices will be limited to short-term methods of staving off our own demise, all while being asked to celebrate the very technology that may alter our work beyond recognition or eliminate it entirely.
Once Man-su has killed his way to a position at Moon Paper, executives tell him that the paper plant has been fully automated, meaning that workers will have to be reduced. “If you don’t like it, you can say no,” one of them says. Everyone in the room laughs, including Man-su. “Not at all,” he says obsequiously. “How can you go against the times? But at any rate, you need one person to watch over it all, right?”
Man-su arrives at the factory, small and alone among the robots. He looks around, then pumps his arms in celebration; he’s won, for now. Despite being told by management that it’s no longer necessary, he performs his old task of hitting a wooden stick against a giant ream of paper, as robot arms punch at it in the background. In the final shot, the lights shut off one by one, until darkness overtakes Man-su.
If this is a victory, it is of a brief and Pyrrhic kind. He’s in fact won nothing, only bought himself some time. Were he to continue on this narrowing path, any windows onto possible resistance would get smaller and smaller. And soon enough, there would be no choices left at all.
Jenny Odell is the author of “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” and “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.”
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