"I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025, says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-year-old. I think it's more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism. AI is so powerful that you can't even compete with it any more No Other Choice's setting is the comically mundane but almost literally cut-throat world of paper manufacturing, where a freshly fired executive hatches a deranged scheme to get ahead by murdering his rivals for a new position,"
"Even though Korean films and shows are so globally trendy, Korean audiences have not been returning to the theatre after the pandemic, and there's also talk around how the TV industry is being threatened. And this decline happened immediately after the success of Squid Game and Parasite. I think that gap in itself is very ironic. Irony is very much the mode with Park's cinema."
"No Other Choice begins with salaryman Man-su (played by Lee Byung-hun) congratulating himself for having it all: a good job, beautiful house, loving wife, two children and two dogs. He welcomes the onset of fall, not realising it augurs his own fall: within days he is on his knees begging for work, having been made redundant by his new American bosses, which leads him to his deranged"
No Other Choice depicts modern-day South Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility. The story is set in a comically mundane but cut-throat paper manufacturing industry where a newly fired executive devises a deranged scheme to murder rivals to secure a promotion. The film functions as a satire on capitalism and comments on the disruptive power of AI. The entertainment industry is portrayed as precarious despite global hits like Squid Game and Parasite, with domestic audiences slow to return to theatres after the pandemic. Irony and satire shape the film's tone.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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