When Park Chan-wook has a film at your festival, you go. That’s the rule. But I was nervous walking in to his film before it premiered at TIFF. His last movie, Decision to Leave, landed near the bottom of my 2022 list, which I know puts me in a tiny minority. I’d loved so much of his earlier work: Oldboy, The Handmaiden that I was shocked to have disliked that mystery so very much. Was I about to sit through another high-profile miss? Thankfully, no. With No Other Choice, the director goes back to doing what he does best: taking apart people and institutions with surgical precision with dark, dark humor.

The film adapts Donald E. Westlake‘s 1997 novel “The Ax,” previously filmed by Costa-Gavras in 2005. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun, The Magnificent Seven) has spent 25 years at a paper company before getting downsized without warning. He has a wife, a stepson, and a daughter whose expensive cello lessons aren’t optional, according to his task-oriented wife. When job interviews lead nowhere, Man-su arrives at a logical, if horrifying, conclusion: the surest way to the top of any hiring list is to remove everyone else on it.

Lee is extraordinary here, playing a man whose frustration starts as wounded pride and slowly calcifies into something terrifying. In an intriguing twist to the norm, the scarier he becomes, the more controlled he gets. That combination, frightening and sad at once, gives the film its strange emotional pull. Son Ye-jin plays his wife Miri, holding the family together while her husband spirals. She handles difficult situations with a ruthlessness that provides some of the sharpest and most observational comedy. Yeom Hye-ran (Memories of Murder) nearly steals the entire movie as the wife of one target, getting tangled in the plot in ways only this director would stage so outrageously.

Visually, Park has never made an ugly film, and this one continues the streak. Cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung shoots even pleasant scenes with an undercurrent of unease. Something always feels off. It reminded me of Parasite, as if both films exist in the same broken world. Editors Kim Sang-beom and Kim Ho-bin cut 139 minutes that never drag.  Park is a director who creates full worlds with important details, so be attentive to everything included by production designer Ryu Seong-hie. Modest houses and inocous offices hide secrets aching to be set free.

Westlake wrote his novel nearly three decades ago, but the anxiety at its core hasn’t faded. If anything, with AI swallowing jobs and layoffs becoming routine, the timing feels sharper now. We’re being pushed apart when we should be coming together. Park understands and explores it with a kind of devil-may-care grace. The final image, hauntingly perfect, says everything about where we’re headed and what we’ve lost to get there.