No Other Choice (2025)

Knowing that the premise of the film is about a man deciding to murder all other competing candidates just to get a job, I expected this film to be another indictment of the kind of late-stage capitalism that warps humanity. This has become a quite oversubscribed theme since Parasite so I was actually a little concerned that it was going to be tired. 

Instead, it is much more nuanced and layered. I find in this propulsive and hilarious film more mockery of the boys' club that the men in the story want to construct for themselves, as well as the silliness of men who ascribe meaning to work underwritten by a system that is by nature mercurial. They say that they do this for their families, which is technically true, but they don't really see their families as human beings they need to be vulnerable to and connect with, but rather only as bodies that come with mouths they need to feed and feet they need to shoe. 

As much as we hate to admit it, life is mostly labor. It's always been this way. And a lot of what decides if you are happy or not is how you find meaning in that labor. Man-su wanted to believe that he derived meaning from taking care of his paper mill workers -- that turned out to be false as he commits serial murder to take a job where he only oversees machines. He chose the industry he works in over the people he worked with to tie his identity to, which was perhaps the biggest mistake that he makes over and over again. He chose the family house over weathering the storm with his family together, chose face over being vulnerable to his wife, and chose to believe in zero-sum over working with the one person he actually connected with. 

Maybe the system he chose to live by rewards this behavior. The film seems less interested in whether he wins than in what playing this game at all costs him, and I hope we are too.