You are living the good life in South Korea. Manager in a paper mill, married with two children, two cars, and two lovely dogs. You live in a lovely restored house in the leafy suburbs. Your daughter has expensive cello lessons, your wife plays tennis in a smart club, and you have dance lessons with other comfortably well-off people.

The film opens with Man-su, the main character, barbecuing eels on the family barbecue.  The eels are a gift from the newly installed American owners of the paper mill.

Then Man-su’s world falls apart. The new US owners are carrying through a brutal restructuring, and he has been made redundant after over 20 years of service.  Man-su’s partner, Miri, organises drastic economic measures.

The most traumatic, at least for the kids, is the removal of the two big dogs. They cost too much to feed. She will no longer play tennis and is preparing to sell the house.  Her man is devastated and says he never wants to leave the house he has lovingly restored.

Cut to the usual corporate programme laid on for its redundant workers. They are told to be dynamic, write their CVs, and draw up a plan of action. Breathing exercises to ease stress are also practised. They have to become the new entrepreneurs – open a cafe or a retail outlet.

Man-su’s entrepreneurial plan…

What happens next takes a little time for the viewer to work out.  Man-su actually adopts all the advice offered by the company.  He has a plan and implements it to devastating effect. A fake job advert is drafted for a role similar to the one he has just lost. He picks out the three strongest candidates.  We follow the black comedy and horror of his campaign of elimination.

The film ends with Man-su reinstalled in the huge factory, but as the lone manager overseeing the AI-automated production process. For most of us who have not seen such factories, it is rather awe-inspiring to see huge machines operating without human intervention.

The director also includes shots of how robot operations begin the entire production process in the forests, where trees are torn out of the ground, their branches shorn, and placed on lorries entirely by machine.

The children reclaim their dogs, and the daughter finally plays her cello for her family for the first time.

Capitalism needs the family as one of its means of reproducing labour power. Families are needed to socialise and raise children so they can eventually become workers.  But families are more than just mechanisms of ideological control.  People find comfort and joy in close family relationships. It can be a refuge or defence against the alienation and brutality of capitalist social relations – a place that is not commodified.

You see the film’s contradictory duality of the family.  Providing for your family remains the key motivation for Man-su and is key to his masculinity. It pushes him to do anything to re-insert himself as a manager.

But the family also exists as a unit that can sustain itself in defiance of the rules and morality of capitalist society. Miri captures this brilliantly in the film’s final part, where she colludes with her husband to prevent the police from discovering what really happened.

Several times in the film, we see in close-up how red bugs are eating up the pear tree. For the director, capitalism is eating up and destroying the possibility of a satisfactory job or a stable emotional life. Capitalism’s morality is dog-eat-dog competitiveness. Men-su merely takes that imperative to its extreme consequences.

Anti-capitalist parable

The film reminded me of the effectiveness of some of the 1950s classic Ealing comedies that exposed the cracks in the system.  For example, The Man in the White Suit, with Alec Guinness, in which the invention of a self-cleaning, long-lasting garment is seen as a threat to capitalist commodity production. 

Exchange value, the ability to turn a profit, is more important than a product’s use value. Today, Park Wook takes up a similar mirror to our society, though he is much less gentle than the Ealing directors.

South Korea is one of the most successful capitalist economies in the world, but its growth has come at a high cost to the environment and human suffering.  Park Wook is acutely aware of this, and his films reflect that understanding. In a recent interview in the Guardian, he said:

I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025,(…)I think it’s more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism.

Park Wook

Like the other hit films, Parasite and TV series like Squid Game, Korean directors are making films that are often more critical than those produced by Hollywood. No Other Choice is based on Donald E Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997, previously filmed in 2005 by left-wing maestro Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated.

Park Wook is also very concerned about how AI is a threat to us all, including in the film industry:

considering the speed of its development in the past year, I’m very concerned for how many people in our film industry will have their jobs replaced by AI

ibid Guardian

Like most films these days, it is too long. You could easily take half an hour out of it.  How did great directors like Billy Wilder make masterpieces that never exceeded 90 minutes? Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable and thought-provoking film worth seeing.

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