By Steve Rose
Publication Date: 2026-01-09 08:00:00
TThe Korean Wave is currently being celebrated around the world, but Park Chan-wook isn’t feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea appears to be a well-oiled machine, churning out a stream of world-famous pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (particularly the Oscar-winning Parasite) and television shows, as well as the Samsung flat screens on which you can watch them. But Park’s latest film “No Other Choice” bursts the balloon a bit. It portrays contemporary Korea as an unstable landscape marked by industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop demon hunters coming to save the day.
“I didn’t want it to be a realistic depiction of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a composed, almost professorial 62-year-old. “I think it’s more accurate to think of it as a satire on capitalism.”
The setting of No Other Choice is the comically banal but literally murderous world of papermaking, in which a fresh…
