His brutal movies put Korean cinema on the map. Now the director of Oldboy is back with a blistering satire about a man driven to murder after redundancy
T
he Korean wave is being feted around the world right now but Park Chan-wook is not feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out a stream of world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park’s latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop Demon Hunters coming to save the day.
“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.”
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, of which he does a pretty bad job. But it could just as well be about the entertainment industry, which is also more precarious than it looks, Park suggests: “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.”
