"The job search has become a humiliation ritual," a headline from The Cut announced late last year. When workers are laid off by wanton private-equity firms who automate and offshore, students struggle to compete against AI for early-career jobs, and US hiring is at its lowest rate in a decade, there's a lot to be pessimistic about.

Meeting that moment is Korean oddball-in-residence director Park Chan-wook. Having tackled psychological torture with Oldboy (2003), bloodsucking with Thirst (2009), and sexual violence with The Handmaiden (2016), he's sharpened his teeth and is ready for his most disturbing subject yet: unemployment. In No Other Choice, Park addresses capitalism, corporate power structures, and the shame of the labor market with his characteristic serrated edge — and while it's far from his strongest work, the movie certainly entertains albeit with uncomfortably dark humor.

Based on Donald Westlake's 1997 horror novel The Ax, No Other Choice follows Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a loyal employee of Solar Paper, a specialty paper manufacturer in Seoul. When Solar is bought out by an American firm, Man-su is a victim of company-wide layoffs and is unable to find a new job. His life quickly begins collapsing around him, as he frets about his marriage with his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), can no longer pay for extracurriculars for his kids, is coming close to foreclosure on the childhood home he worked so hard to buy, and even has to send his beloved dogs to live with his in-laws.

After an important interview goes especially poorly, Man-su snaps. Desperate, he publishes a fake job application to ensnare peer top specialty paper experts who he fears are competing with him for these jobs. Coming to the conclusion that there are only three other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won, and Park Hee-soon) that are between him and getting hired, he fantasizes about their convenient deaths. Fantasies tend to go too far, and Man-su's madcap cat-and-mouse stalking escalates in increasingly gory and absurd ways as he tries to keep his home life from falling apart.

Nobody comes to a Park Chan-wook movie expecting a sunny walk in the park, but from a fairly lighthearted setup at the papermaking factory, No Other Choice gets dark, fast. Early on, the trauma of losing a job is played mostly for laughs (with a goofy Alcoholics-Anonymous-style support group circle all manifesting positive thoughts), as are the supposedly hard budget cuts the family needs to make (with Netflix being a particularly tough loss for the sulky teenage boy). Even Man-su's first contemplation of murder (the scene on the movie's poster) is cartoonish. So when he finds a gun and starts honeypotting his competition — all equally pathetic, unfulfilled middle-aged men trying to find meaning in their post-employment lives — their false hope is heartbreaking, as is their increasingly dismal prospects for survival. 

During their road to perdition, the refrain throughout is that Man-su, his colleagues, their employers, and even the police all have "no other choice" than the destructive paths they're on. There's a dark irony to this echoing claim: on one hand, for example, there truly is no other choice, under capitalism, than sucking it up and getting a crappy job to survive; on the other, our characters are constantly scapegoating others and refusing to take responsibility for their actions, so their lack of "other choices" is a self-fulfilling prophecy as they wallow in pity. This is a sharp take, and no doubt a tough one to swallow; sometimes, you do have another choice, even one you may not like thanks to an unjust system. 

Although that distinctive edge is visible in outline, Park's cultural criticism here would come through clearer if the film felt less slapdash; bouncing between Man-su's children's after-school exploits and Mi-ri's possible affair with her dentist and the police detective's investigation of a potential homicide with just a few cuts is overwhelming, and wears down the audience over a 139-minute runtime. Sure, some of the side adventures are endearingly strange, such as a story Man-su tells of his grandfather's slaughter of 20,000 diseased pigs, or the bond he shares with his son over a petty crime the younger Yoo commits or the cigarettes he's sneaking. And Park knows as well as the creators of The Office that papermaking is an inherently funny business, and many of the best gags (and the poignancy of the climax) benefit from the absurdity of such a commoditized industry. But pacing issues still pervade, such as much too long a focus on the first paper expert and his annoying wife, and Mi-ri's quirked-up characterization never settles on anything convincing either. 

Audiovisually, composer Cho Young-wuk crafts a beautiful score that both heightens the diegetic music (such as played loudly over stereos during a tense scene, forlornly at a dance with a wife abandoned, or in the room of the virtuoso daughter) and elevates otherwise mundane moments of suburban Seoul, and production designer Ryu Seong-hie creates expressive sets with some of the most architecturally interesting houses I've seen on screen. 

With solid source material and capable direction, No Other Choice forces introspection on the stories we tell ourselves —  especially in and about our role in the workplace — through some pretty startling images of hogtied men, live burials, forced vomit, and chainsaw-wielding killers. But what else would we expect from Park Chan-wook?