No Other Choice (2025): Exploring South Korea's capitalistic and patriarchal society

It is rare to see a film adaptation of a novel that feels so intensely original that it seems to predate the source material. While I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax or the 2005 Costa-Gavras film of the same name, I feel a strange conviction that Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2005) is as much an adaptation of the western source material as it is a story of Korean origin.

Park is no stranger to adaptation. His claim to fame is Oldboy (2003), an adaptation of a Japanese manga. He is also no stranger to adapting western source materials. 2016’s The Handmaiden is an excellent (and defiantly Asian) adaptation of the Welsh period novel Fingersmith (2002). A key strength in Park’s style of adaptation is the infusion of Korean contexts into the universal themes present in the western source materials. For instance, in The Handmaiden, the sense of alienation between key characters in the story are intensified by the fact that they speak different languages and come from different cultures and classes, a result of the unequal social structure coupled with the historical context of a Japanese-occupied Korea. 

Director Park Chan Wook

(Credit: CNN)

In No Other Choice, Park retains the core premise of Westlake’s novel: a middle-management man is laid off from his job at a paper company, tries to find a new job but is unsuccessful, and eventually resorts to killing job candidates that could compete for his spot. But aside from capturing the sense of desperation and helplessness of late-stage capitalism, No Other Choice pokes fun at the internalisation of the capitalistic-patriarchical structure of society among Korean men.

One week after watching the film, I had a conversation with two Korean friends. She was telling me about a company in Korea with insanely unhealthy work ethics - “most companies,” her other friend quipped. In their description of the crazed pride people feel towards their jobs in those contexts, patriarchy and manhood were always on their lips. There is a sense that the reproductions of inequality in the economic and gender domains are results of the same force, or at least complementary forces, which I admit is not a groundbreaking revelation anywhere in the world today.

Lee Byung Hun as Yoo Man Su in No Other Choice (2025)

(Credit: The Strait Times)

What is groundbreaking about No Other Choice is how Park is able to lay bare these internalized structures in a way that feels very specific. Whatever Park is trying to say about Korean society, it is both universal and contextual. Specific references to social practices - drinking, soju bomb - and historical context - the Korean/ Vietnam war - gives the film the sharp texture of dark reality, smoothened by the universality of satire and dark comedies: perhaps the most comedic yet of Park’s extensive oeuvre.

Park’s film seems to echo some of the key arguments of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, especially his use of the concept of habitus, which refers to the shared ways in which people in a given society sees the world and attribute values to things. Man-su, the main character of No Other Choice played brilliantly by Lee Byung-hun, and the many men competing against him for the middle-management position engage in a very specific worldview. Somehow, they were simply born to manage paper factories. They see themselves as solely responsible for “putting food on the table”. There are historical contexts to these capitalist-patriarchical perceptions: in a conversation with his son, Man-su uses the language of war - “our family is at war”// “we have to protect the woman” - and in his killing he uses his father’s gun from the Vietnam war. History shapes culture and culture shapes habitus. It is this habitus that creates the belief that there is “no other choice” but to kill your competition.

Son Ye Jin as Yoo Mi Ri in No Other Choice (2025)

(Credit: The Korea Times)

Ironically, the choices are not necessarily limited for the main character of No Other Choice. I do not know if this is the intention for Westlake’s novel, but by making the protagonist a middle-management employee rather than a bottom-of-the-wrung laborer, Park tackles how capitalism traps the upper-middle class: by creating a perception of determinism. As Man-su’s wife and another wife of a slain competitor both express, there are many other options aside from managing a paper company. All those choices simply require these men to let go of their pride. But in a capitalistic-patriarchical society, they would sooner go to war than recognise an alternate path.