‘No Different Selection’ overview: Park Chan-wook’s anti-capitalist parable skewers the job market

If you happen to took a shot for each company euphemism in No Different Selection, you would be circling again, getting in a unique path, discovering your providers not required, rightsized, downsized, and as plastered as one of many characters.

The very title itself evades duty, a phrase utilized by huge corporations to cover behind intentional, chilly decision-making. On this excellent darkish comedy-thriller, legendary South Korean director Park Chan-wook delivers a biting social commentary on the brutal job market and its related hyper-competitiveness that sees candidates out for blood, actually.

Based mostly on Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax and written by Park, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Don McKellar, the movie presents an anti-capitalist fable about office politics, the place cruel firm restructuring drives a determined household man (Squid Sport‘s Lee Byung-hun) to violence — regardless of his lack of expertise in that division. Whereas not as ultraviolent as Park’s lauded Vengeance Trilogy or as seductive as his current Hitchockian movie Resolution to Depart, the director hypothesises the fallout of company redundancies by way of this bumbling self-made murderer — one whose inept, maddening choices will make you contemplate the morality of all of it.

Underneath stress to offer, is murdering his approach right into a job the one choice on this economic system? 

No Different Selection sees a household man scorned in a hyper-competitive, capitalist actuality.

In an unhinged, uncomfortably empathetic efficiency by Lee, the nucleus of the movie is Yoo Man-soo, a hardworking, proud, and long-serving worker at specialist paper firm Photo voltaic Paper. He is saved sufficient to purchase his father’s gorgeous home and supply his spouse Mi-ri (Crash Touchdown on You‘s Son Ye-jin) and two youngsters a cushty, upper-middle-class life, filled with cello classes, outside barbecues, and designer items. It is all captured in a saturated golden mild and dynamic cinematography from Kim Woo-hyung — with whom Park labored on The Little Drummer Woman sequence. However when Man-soo is abruptly fired after many years of firm loyalty, payments stack up and pragmatic Mi-ri declares their want to regulate — and it isn’t simply creature comforts which can be despatched packing however precise creatures too, together with their pair of cute, obedient golden retrievers.

No company mindfulness workshop may assuage Man-soo’s fears of everlasting unemployment and the societal disgrace of all of it. In the meantime, Mi-ri will get her personal job at a dentist’s workplace, the place the handsomeness of her new boss fuels Man-soo’s jealousy and dedication to reclaim his breadwinning pleasure.

Instantly, the proper alternative (or any alternative in any respect) seems on the horizon on the rival Moon Paper, with Man-soo dealing with an intimidating ocean of potential candidates and AI-powered replacements. Not seeing a snowball’s likelihood in hell of getting the place, he writes a shortlist of candidates (Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min) that would beat him to the job, desiring to get rid of them — for good. Which means luring them into making use of for jobs at his pretend firm and killing his approach again into employability, one after the other.

Park Chan-wook subverts his signature vengeance mode to scrutinise morality and duty.

Lee Byung-hun and Lee Sung-min in “No Different Selection.”
Credit score: BFI London Movie Competition

The search for vengeance and self-satisfaction runs rivers of blood all through Park’s work, with revenge fueling his lauded 2000s triptych Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Girl Vengeance. However the place the protagonists of the Vengeance Trilogy had a selected set of expertise and life-defining scores to settle, Man-soo of No Different Selection embodies each novice killer-to-be and believer of himself as a Good Individual. 

Because the title suggests, Park’s movie is a tough lesson in individualist finger-pointing and evasive company euphemisms that sees its protagonist deflect any type of duty for his actions. Man-soo believes he has, in any case, exhausted all choices. Right here, as in Park’s line of retaliatory narratives, No Different Selection explores ethical and moral boundaries; Man-soo believes his behaviour is justified for the good thing about his household and his personal sense of pleasure as supplier.

With a spectacularly bodily efficiency of pure desperation from Lee, Yoo Man-soo flails his approach by way of violent encounters, considered one of which is darkly comedic (and stolen by the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran as a goal candidate’s spouse), one other grotesque and calculated. It is these scenes that see Park in superb contained chaos mode, the grasp of escalating, brutal pandemonium inside one set-piece. Park persistently reveals Man-soo on the precipice of violence: The household man standing on the sting of an house roof holding a heavy pot plant above a competitor completely encapsulates the movie’s ongoing “Will he truly do it?” rigidity. Right here, Park deploys Kim’s stylised cinematography and daring enhancing by Kim Sang-bum to intensify the extra operatic parts of the story. 

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As a viewer, we’re concurrently rooting for Man-soo and unnerved by his capability for calculated manipulation and homicide. No Different Selection poses the query: Would you kill for the life you need? In actual fact, the movie would not even ask it, as an alternative presenting a person believing himself pressured into making such a call on account of chilly, exhausting company technique. It is out of his fingers. It is a top-down determination. If you actually contemplate it, Man-soo’s merely delivering on blue sky pondering.

No Different Selection is now in theaters.

UPDATE: Dec. 18, 2025, 2:30 p.m. “No Different Selection” was reviewed out of BFI London Movie Competition. This overview, initially printed Oct. 17, 2025, has been up to date to incorporate details about the theatrical launch.