No Other Choice, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s latest film, begins almost pastorally, an idyll of present-day domestic tranquility as Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) dines alfresco with his family. Their main course includes eel, a gift from Solar Paper, the company that’s employed Man-su for the past quarter century. The surrounding nature is positively bucolic, buttressed by leafy trees and blooming flowers. When the meal ends, Man-su gathers his family—wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), stepson Si-one, daughter Ri-one, and two large dogs—in a collective hug. It’s as good as it gets. One can almost hear the “dun-dun-DUN” chords as the precipitous downhill slide begins.

And oh, what a slide. The Americans and their zest for downsizing have come for Solar Paper, and Man-su is summarily laid off. A vow to find work within three months is easily shattered. More than a year passes by; the family can only economize so much. Man-su’s controlled rage grows and grows as he endures life-coaching workshops, begs former colleagues to hire him, and swallows his pride to work retail.

No Other Choice, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s latest film, begins almost pastorally, an idyll of present-day domestic tranquility as Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) dines alfresco with his family. Their main course includes eel, a gift from Solar Paper, the company that’s employed Man-su for the past quarter century. The surrounding nature is positively bucolic, buttressed by leafy trees and blooming flowers. When the meal ends, Man-su gathers his family—wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), stepson Si-one, daughter Ri-one, and two large dogs—in a collective hug. It’s as good as it gets. One can almost hear the “dun-dun-DUN” chords as the precipitous downhill slide begins.

And oh, what a slide. The Americans and their zest for downsizing have come for Solar Paper, and Man-su is summarily laid off. A vow to find work within three months is easily shattered. More than a year passes by; the family can only economize so much. Man-su’s controlled rage grows and grows as he endures life-coaching workshops, begs former colleagues to hire him, and swallows his pride to work retail.

As his middle-class life collapses, the unthinkable becomes possible: Why not kill the potential competition? Why not cross every moral line to salvage a way of life that would be too humiliating to lose? All it takes is setting up a fake company, poring through resumes, and choosing the best candidates—to eliminate, not to hire.

Lee, as the ordinary man turned multiple murderer by circumstances both within and beyond his control, captures the viewer’s attention from the first: We want to root for him to succeed in his misbegotten quest because Lee fully inhabits his character’s skewed sense of self. All he wants is normalcy and order, but if the world can’t provide it, why should he? When the world stops playing by the rules Man-su knows, he no longer needs to follow them—even if it means killing people he might have been colleagues, or even friends, with.

What follows is a deeply moving and savagely funny film, one made even better by the collective talents of the actors and director. Park, at 62 and after more than three decades of film work, is in complete control: every scene building upon the prior, every visual and musical cue there for a reason, merging violence and absurdity into an unforgettable brew.

Even when bursts of violence are abrupt, they’re never frenetic. Park seems almost unhurried, allowing for sumptuous visuals to linger in the frame, or for reaction shots to last a beat longer than expected. I hardly noticed that the film lasted 139 minutes, in large part because I wanted to stay with the narrative, to see in what fresh hell Man-su would find himself, and whether he could possibly get out of the situation this time.

No Other Choice took more than two decades to develop. Park started “falling in love,” as the New York Timesput it, with The Ax, Donald Westlake’s ice-cold thriller masterpiece, a few years after its 1997 publication. At first, Park was disappointed that Greek French filmmaker Costa-Gavras got to the novel first, adapting it fairly faithfully in tone and style (while transplanting the action from the Rust Belt and Connecticut to France) as Le couperet in 2005. But Park was determined to set his film, with a screenplay cowritten by Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar, as well as two other Korean writers, in the United States: “This is a story about the capitalist system,” Park told the Times. “I thought it would be best told in America, since America is the heart of capitalism.”

A dozen years passed and there were no financial takers in the United States. One of Park’s producers, Michèle Ray-Gavras—the wife and collaboration partner of Costa-Gavras, to whom No Other Choice is dedicated—suggested he transplant the setting to South Korea. He resisted, but “now that we’ve made it into a Korean film, I’m thinking, why didn’t I just do this a lot earlier?”

Clearly, this was the correct decision. No Other Choice inhabits its chosen world, the domestic frustrations and societal anguish, with an ease of someone who knows this world intimately. Park clearly drew, consciously or otherwise, on the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, which upended how South Koreans—particularly men of the middle-class—lived their lives. The unemployment rate ballooned from 2.1 percent in the fall of 1997 to 8.6 percent in 1999, leaving upwards of 2 million people without regular employment. Rather than jobs they could stay in throughout adulthood, all their needs provided for until a comfortable retirement, uncertainty transformed into despair as these same men were laid off en masse, unable to support their families in the ways they had become accustomed to.

No Other Choice is set in the present world, with the ubiquity of smartphones, the prospect of having to cancel Netflix as a sign of unthinkable downward mobility, and the looming specter of generative AI. But the film didn’t have to do much to update Westlake’s novel, itself chronicling the hangover of the early 1990s U.S. recession and slow recovery. As one once-laid-off reader later told Westlake, “Now that I’ve read your book I’m surprised that murder never occurred to me in those 18 months.”

Park, however, makes different decisions about tone and style, mixing in moments of pure farce as Man-su pursues his demented plan and lassoes others, willingly or otherwise, into his scheme. Pivotal points in No Other Choice hinge on a sudden snakebite; forcing sausages down the gullet of a man being buried alive; a costumed dance sequence; and a gruesome scene involving an infected tooth.

I was especially struck by an extended scene about a third into the film, where Man-su, his first target Beom-mo, and the latter’s wife, Ara, battle for Man-su’s gun, the camera panning from one person to the next. The action is alternately horrifying and absurd because the trio is equally murderous and inept, none of them really knowing what to do with a decades-old gun that doesn’t work right—until it does.

No Other Choice also develops the story’s female characters more fully than did The Ax and its first film adaptation. Son Ye-jin is a marvel as Lee Mi-ri, her face a mix of disappointment and determination as she tightens the family financial belt, as she must go back out in the workforce; as her son falls into a life of petty criminality and her daughter turns even more inward in her zealous pursuit of musical excellence; and as she comes to terms with the depths her husband sinks, and decides she will, in fact, be his willing accomplice, not just a passive observer. The zeal with which she digs up an area outside the house, and the quick change to stoicism upon discovering what’s actually buried there, is an entire journey. This is no woman to underestimate, but someone making active choices in domestic complicity.

Yeom Hye-ran, as Ara, is also exceptional in No Other Choice. From the anguish that plays on her face as she details the toll of her husband’s deepening, unemployment-induced depression, to the flagrant ecstasy of her coupling with a lover, to her own reckoning with violence, Hye-ran takes what could have been a forgettable part and makes it indelible—scenery not just chewed, but scorched. Another standout performance, entirely different in character and delivery, comes from Choi So Yul as Ri-one, who submerges her emotions entirely in her dedicated, obsessive playing of the cello, even as she refuses to allow her family to hear the extent of her prodigal talent.

Even the seemingly happy ending, showing that Man-su survives the chaos of his own making and order—in the form of a new job, a restored family and house, and a bright future—has a serious sting in the tail. When he lost his job, the analog world Man-su craves was already a relic of an earlier time; the plant where he’ll now work—a solitary man in the midst of machines and AI working at a capacity humans can only barely feint at—will also have an expiration date. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

Had No Other Choice been an American story, as The Ax was, Park would have had little choice but to contend with the absurdity that is the United States in the present day, taking away from the story’s universality. Setting the film at home, jettisoning whatever restless energy animated his earlier films and leaning into the more controlled storytelling of Decision to Leave and The Sympathizer, was clearly the right choice. In doing so, Park has also fulfilled Donald Westlake’s own repeated ethos: “I believe my subject is bewilderment, but I could be wrong.”