The new trailer for Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice may actually make you feel thankful for LinkedIn, Indeed, and the endless stream of interviews every company seems to require nowadays. Getting rejected from a dream job may feel like the end of the world, but for the most part, it won’t actually kill you. Many of the job-seekers in the Oldboyand Decision To Leave director’s blistering new satire won’t be so lucky.
Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, No Other Choice tells the story of Man-soo (Squid Game‘s Lee Byung-hun), a man on a “desperate hunt for a new job after his abrupt layoff from the paper company he served for 25 years,” per its logline. “Desperate” is almost an understatement. In the trailer, Man-soo attempts to literally kill his competition, first with a dropped vase to the head and eventually with a gun hidden under several layers of what appear to be oven mitts. (It’s that first attempt that earns the trailer’s title drop, by the way; Man-soo simply has “no other choice.”) Of course, none of this actually guarantees he’ll get the job; he still has to impress the boss in his interview.
If this scenario sounds like an extremely dark twist on a familiar favorite, you’re not alone in drawing that parallel. The back half of No Other Choice is “like if an episode of The Office culminated in Jim turning into a serial killer,” Jason Gorber wrote in his review for The A.V. Club. Neon gave No Other Choice a cheery Christmas Day premiere date (in select theaters), so you can take in some more job stress on your brief time off. If you want to save that for the new year, the film opens everywhere in January.
