Worried about the job market or stuck in a toxic workplace? These 2 movies can feel like ‘catharsis’

Feeling disappointed by your job or job search? Two recent films might strike a chord.

Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” and Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” imagine what happens when workers in bad situations, whether a stagnant job market or a toxic workplace, are pushed to their limits, with murderous consequences. They offer cathartic, if violent, outlooks on the worker angst and desperation in the zeitgeist. Part dark comedy and part horror, they touch on perennial workplace anxieties but are particularly timely now.

Sluggish hiring means many employees feel stuck, and many job seekers are struggling to find work. Last year, U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs, compared to 1.46 million in 2024, making it the worst year for hiring since 2020, and the worst since 2003 outside of a recession. As of January, 1 in 4 unemployed people, roughly 1.8 million Americans, have been looking for work for more than six months, according to BLS data.

Meanwhile, those with jobs are anxious about losing them amid economic uncertainty, AI adoption, and layoffs. Job cuts announced in January hit their highest monthly total to start a year since 2009, according to a report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And the quits rate of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs — which can reflect their degree of confidence in the job market — stayed relatively low at around 2% throughout 2025.

Against this backdrop, the films offer “a way to feel in control of something you can’t control,” says Alicia Grandey, co-author of “Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work” and a workplace psychology professor at Penn State University. The films make our work anxieties feel “distant and more controllable, like you can turn it off.”

That could be welcome distance for many feeling powerless in the job market and workplace today. Fear of losing your job can be “paralyzing” and feel “like you have absolutely no control over the situation,” career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin previously told CNBC Make It. The fact that “work is the single most important way of proving your worth” as a person in the U.S., Steven Vallas, professor emeritus of sociology at Northeastern University, previously told Make It, “can really compound those feelings of shame and the anxiety about being unemployed.”

The extreme plotlines of “No Other Choice” and “Send Help” are part of their magic.

“It’s taking these feelings that many, many people have to an extreme, so that you know it’s not real,” Grandey says. “You can still revel in that power shift, you can still relate to the character, and recognize it’s over-the-top fantasy, but absolutely, it’s catharsis, it’s venting.”

And then, she adds, “when you come back to the real world, it by contrast doesn’t seem as bad.”

“No Other Choice,” an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 book, “The Ax,” follows a middle-aged Korean man, Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), who is laid off from a specialty papermaker after a business takeover. When his job applications for new positions go nowhere, and his family starts feeling the squeeze to their comfortable middle-class life, Man-su starts killing his fellow candidates to boost his chances of finding work.

He tells his first victim, “Sorry, but you must disappear for me to live.”

The film speaks to the desperation of job seekers today, the steep competition they face and the zero-sum calculus that dictates the job search for many candidates.

In June, for example, LinkedIn said it had seen a 45% increase in the number of applications submitted on its platform in the past year, with roughly 10,000 applications sent every minute. In the fourth quarter of 2025, a ZipRecruiter survey saw its lowest Expectations Index — measuring how applicants think the job market will fare in the next six months — since the survey began in 2022, with 39.5% expecting a decrease in available positions in this period.

On-screen as in reality, even those with jobs feel precarious in their positions. Job hugging has made headlines in recent months, a phenomenon that describes workers “holding onto their jobs for dear life” amid global uncertainty, fears of AI disruption and a tough job market, Korn Ferry consultants wrote in August.

When Choi Seon-chul, a hotshot at a rival paper firm says he’s swamped at work, Man-su tells him to faint so the higher-ups will hire Man-su to help divvy up the work. But the bosses wouldn’t hire Man-su to help, Seon-chul retorts; they’d just fire Seon-chul instead.

“No Other Choice” also touches on anxieties around AI-related job disruption. In Man-su’s final interview in the film, the committee says the employer uses automation and plans to cut jobs soon. Man-su can only smile and concede, “Of course. How can you go against the times?”

Spoiler alert: In the end, Man-su gets the job, in which he’s the only human among many machines in a sterile factory. He celebrates and pumps his fists before his expression settles into a haunting, resigned acceptance. In this moment we see his prize is a dismal job, and one likely headed towards obsolescence at that.

Even conventional markers of career success, like getting a long sought-after job, disappoint.

We see that disappointment at work in “Send Help.” The movie puts a workplace spin on the female rage film, where fed-up women finally explode, to dangerous effect.

Worker bee Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), has been snubbed for a promotion, had credit for her work stolen, and otherwise contended with a toxic workplace permeated by bro culture, all spearheaded by her awful boss, nepo baby CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). When Linda and Bradley are the only survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island, she sees an opportunity to turn the tables on her boss and get revenge for how he’s treated her.

It’s “a fantasy of every person who’s been mistreated at work,” Grandey says.

There’s a clear reversal of the manager-report power dynamic and gender roles the pair had in the office, where Bradley as CEO wielded power over Linda, who had hit a glass ceiling in their boys’ club of a company. On the island, Liddle, a “Survivor” contestant hopeful, shelters and feeds them, hunting boar to quite literally bring home the bacon, while a sullen Bradley attempts to spell “HELP” in the sand but only manages “HEPL.”

As Linda reminds him, “We’re not in the office anymore, Bradley.”

In both films, the protagonists feel so disillusioned with the existing systems of finding, keeping and succeeding at work that they believe their only hope is outside these systems. Man-su, of course, goes an extrajudicial route in his killings. Linda at one point hides from a rescue team, dreading a return to a society where the Bradleys of the world trod over the Lindas.

She closes out “Send Help” with a bold, if dispiriting, piece of advice: “No help is coming, so you better start saving yourself.”

In the real world, workers and job seekers don’t see outcomes as dramatic or decisive as Man-su and Linda get on-screen. But some are sticking it out in roles they’re unhappy in or feeling like they’re sending job applications into a black hole.

“There are major seismic shifts” happening in the market and the world, Grandey says, “that are pushing everyone to feel job insecure.”

The relatability of the protagonists’ struggles “allows us to feel more in control and empowered, because we can feel like them in that two-hour period,” Grandey adds. “And then we have to go back to our lives, but we carry a little bit of that empowerment with us.”

If you’re experiencing a mental health crisis or concerning mental health symptoms, you can contact the free, confidential National Helpline for Mental Health at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).