“The Americans say to be fired is to ‘be axed.’ Do you know what we say in Korea? ‘Off with your head!’ So being fired is having your head chopped clear off with an ax!” Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is practicing this impassioned speech with three of his fellow workers at a paper factory in South Korea in an early scene in No Other Choice (directed by Park Chan-wook). Solar Paper has just been purchased by an American company, and Man-su, a veteran floor manager, has been asked to provide a list of expendable employees to support the company’s cost-saving measures. Offended on behalf of his fellow workers, many of whom have worked for the company since their late adolescence, Man-su prepares his rousing speech, sure it will convince the higher-ups. He barely gets out a first sentence before he learns that he is expendable, too.
The next thing he knows, he is weeping alongside other middle-aged men in a support group for the unemployed, practicing mantras like “I am a good person” and “My family loves me,” as though job loss might call both propositions into question. The humiliations don’t end there. His wife oscillates between relentless optimism and brutal cost-saving measures that threaten their middle-class identity. No more Netflix, no more tennis lessons; even the family dogs are shipped off to the grandparents to shrink the food bills.
When Man-su notices the same crop of applicants at all his interviews, he begins to suspect that his woes are more universal. The paper business is being automated and outsourced. There are more overqualified mid-career candidates for a shrinking pool of jobs. Faced with this realization, he decides he has no other choice than to knock off his competition—literally. His plan is harder to execute in practice than theory (pun intended), and the film veers into madcap farce and dark social commentary. Man-su stalks, manipulates, and even sometimes befriends his intended victims, getting snared in details of their personal lives. Each turn around the murderous carousel yields more outlandish schemes and requires more devious planning. All the while, his family, for whom he believes he is undertaking such drastic action, begins to disintegrate under the pressure of his violent distraction.
