No Other Choice (2025) review

After spending a quarter of a century working for the Solar Paper company, Yoo Man-Su (Lee Byung-Hun) loses his job and is unable to continue to provide a comfortable life for his wife Lee Mi-Ri (Son Ye-Jin), step-son and musically gifted daughter, so he comes up with a plan to advertise for a non-existent paper manufacturer, collect resumes of individuals that have higher qualifications than him and then kill them off to eliminate any possible competition.  It's a slice of American Pessimism (the source book is by crime writer Donald Westlake) turned into a bit of black comedy by director Park (who co-wrote the screenplay), and although the "message" of the movie hits a nerve - Capitalism turns workers against each other while the management and shareholders still turn a profit - Man-Su's targets are even more pathetic than he is, and the filmmaker's snide tone and stylistic flourishes can be hard to take.  It does deserve credit for its foreboding last few scenes: artificial intelligence and robotics are going to replace humans in many areas, and machines and code aren't so easy to dismantle.  Once they develop cyborgs to educate America's teenagers, I will happily delete my PowerPoint files.