EF NEONNo serious discussion of the best living film directors is complete without Park Chan-wook. From his international breakout with Oldboy through masterpieces like The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave, Park has established himself as a modern master of the thriller genre — as much as any of his films can be contained by a single genre, of course. Because while they usually contain some combination of murder, mayhem, and/or suspense, Park’s films are also bitingly funny. And his latest, No Other Choice, is no exception. In a typically left-field choice, Park’s most recent film is based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, the American midcentury pulp author whose work also inspired the nihilistic crime classic Point Blank (which Inverse just recommended earlier this week). The Ax was first published in 1997, and had already been adapted into a movie by the French director Costa-Gavras when Park bought the rights to the novel all the way back in 2009. With all that in mind, then, it’s ironic how perfect No Other Choice ended up being for our current dystopian late-capitalist moment. Park updates the location to modern-day South Korea, where company man Yoo Man-su (Lee-Byung-hun) is abruptly laid off from his job after decades of service. Man-su struggles to find another job in the paper business, and 13 months later he’s been reduced to begging for a job from one of his former underlings at Moon Paper, the last paper company in the area — and, it seems to the desperate Man-su, the world — that’s actually hiring. The groveling does him no good, but the incident gives Man-su an idea: His field is highly specialized, which means that, in terms of real competition, only a handful of people are truly qualified for the job Man-su believes to be rightfully his. There are only three, in fact, including the current manager — and if all of them just so happened to disappear mysteriously around the same time, then, well, the company would have — wait for it — no other choice but to hire Man-su. Then he won’t lose his family house, which he bought back after his parents were forced to sell it during their own period of economic struggle. He won’t have to take his daughter, who everyone says is a prodigy, out of her expensive cello lessons, thus destroying her potential. He’ll even be able to get the family dogs back — he re-homed them with his wife’s parents after dog food started getting too expensive. Oops! Lee Byung-hun burns the evidence in No Other Choice. | NEONOne of the most interesting things about No Other Choice is the way it frames Man-su’s choices as understandable and frivolous at the same time, neither validating nor condemning the murder spree he decides is — again — his only choice if he wants to get his life back on track. Mostly, it uses that murder spree as fuel for pitch-black comedy, like the scene where Man-su, his target, and his target’s wife all fight over the same handgun; Man-su wants to murder the man for his resume, but the couple is trying to murder each other, too. All this is filtered through Park’s lavishly sensual style, giving the audience such absurd, yet undeniable pleasures as a shot filmed from inside the glass where a character has just taken his first drink after nine years of sobriety. It’s the kind of bold choice that only a master filmmaker like Park can pull off, fueled by a rage that feels very timely — this April, both Disney and Meta axed thousands of jobs, including Disney’s entire home-video division — and also universal. Park Chan-wook on the set of No Other Choice. | NEONThat last observation is a little depressing, but it comes from Park himself: “Whenever I told people about the story, no matter the time period or country they came from, they would always say how relatable it was,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview last fall. That relatability may not apply specifically to layoffs, however, but to the fear of losing one’s status in society and everything that goes along with it. Becoming a serial murderer because you can no longer bear the indignity of filling out your job history when you already uploaded your resume to the portal might be extreme, but every job hunter has felt a twinge of that basic emotion at one time or another. So even if you aren’t already a fan of Park Chan-wook or Lee Byung-hun — and you might be; he’s one of South Korea’s most recognizable actors, appearing in everything from Squid Game to the G.I. Joe movies — give No Other Choice a chance. You just might find it cathartic. No Other Choice is now streaming on Hulu.