The job market is murder in the new trailer for Park Chan-wook’s timely satire ‘No Other Choice’
The official trailer for Park Chan-wook‘s No Other Choice has been released, inviting audiences straight into the director’s brutally funny world of biting satire.
Park, the visionary director of South Korean classics like Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, has been primarily working in television for the last few years. After 2022’s Decision to Leave, which landed him the Cannes Film Festival’s award for ‘Best Director’ and became Mubi’s most-streamed film upon its release, he co-created the HBO historical black comedy The Sympathizer, starring Robert Downey Jr as five different characters orbiting the Vietnam War.
With No Other Choice, Park has returned to the big screen, with the early word coming out of its Venice Film Festival premiere being overwhelmingly positive. Fans of Park’s signature ultra-violent, blackly comedic films can now get a look at the first full trailer, following a short teaser released in July.
No Other Choice stars Squid Game‘s Lee Byung-hun as a middle-aged worker whose life suddenly becomes unmoored when he loses the job he’s held down for decades. Quickly realising that the modern job market is a cutthroat, nightmarish hellscape of endless applicants for precious few jobs, he comes up with a novel solution to the problem: he’ll just kill his competition.
Naturally, uber-gory mayhem ensues, all played with darkly hilarious panache by Park, whose films always navigate a tragicomic tonal tightrope perfectly.
The film, which has been called Park’s most accessible to mainstream audiences yet, is being released by Neon in North America. It will premiere in select cinemas on Christmas Day before a wide rollout in January 2026. In the UK and Ireland, though, it will skip cinemas altogether and stream on Mubi.
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