Are you worried about the job market or stuck in a toxic workplace? These two movies can feel ‘cathartic’

Feeling disappointed in your job or job search? Two recent movies may resonate.

Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” and Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” imagine what happens when workers in bad situations, such as a stagnant job market or a toxic workplace, are pushed to their limits, with murderous consequences. They offer a violent but cathartic view of worker anxiety and despair in the zeitgeist. Part dark comedy, part horror, it touches on long-standing concerns in the workplace, but it’s especially timely right now.

Low hiring means many employees are feeling stranded and many job seekers are having a hard time finding work. Last year, U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs compared to 1.46 million in 2024, making it the worst year for employment since 2020 and the worst year since 2003, excluding recessions. As of January, one in four unemployed Americans, or about 1.8 million Americans, had been looking for work for more than six months, according to BLS data.

Meanwhile, those with jobs are worried about losing their jobs amid economic uncertainty, AI adoption, and layoffs. Layoffs announced in January were the highest monthly total in a year since 2009, according to a report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Additionally, the turnover rate for workers who voluntarily quit their jobs, which may reflect their level of confidence in the labor market, remained relatively low at around 2% throughout 2025.

Against this backdrop, movies offer “a way to feel in control of things you can’t control,” says Alicia Grandi, a professor of workplace psychology at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of “Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work.” The film makes our work-related anxieties feel “distant, more controllable, as if they could be erased.”

For many who feel powerless in today’s job market and workplace, that may be a welcome distance. Career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin previously told CNBC’s Make It that fear of losing a job can make you feel “paralyzed” and “feel like you have no control over the situation.” Stephen Vallas, professor emeritus of sociology at Northeastern University, previously told Make It that the fact that as Americans, “work is the single most important way to prove your worth” “can exacerbate feelings of shame and anxiety about being unemployed.”

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

“When you take these feelings that so many people have and take them to the extreme, you realize they’re not real,” Grundy said. “You can still enjoy that power shift, you can empathize with the characters, and you can recognize that it’s an over-the-top fantasy, but it’s definitely cathartic and an outlet.”

“When you come back to the real world, by contrast, it doesn’t seem so bad,” she added.

Adapted from Donald Westlake’s 1997 book “The Ax,” “No Other Choice” follows Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged Korean man who is fired from a specialty paper manufacturer after its business is acquired. When his application for a new job goes awry and his family’s comfortable middle-class life begins to strain, Mance begins murdering fellow candidates to improve his chances of finding the job.

He says to his first victim, “I’m sorry, but I need you gone in order for me to live.”

The film speaks to the desperation of today’s job seekers, the fierce competition they face, and the zero-sum calculations that govern many job seekers’ job searches.

LinkedIn, for example, announced in June that the number of applications submitted on its platform has increased by 45% over the past year, to about 10,000 applications being submitted every minute. In Q4 2025, ZipRecruiter’s survey found that the expectations index (a measure of how well applicants think the job market will perform over the next six months) was at its lowest since the survey began in 2022, with 39.5% expecting fewer open positions over this period.

On screen as in real life, even people who have jobs feel insecure about their position. Job hugging has made headlines in recent months, a phenomenon that means workers are “clinging on to a job for life” amid global uncertainty, fears of AI disruption, and a tough job market, Korn Ferry consultants wrote in August.

When Choi Sung-chul, a talented man at a rival paper company, says that he is busy with work, Man-soo tells him to lose his mind because the higher-ups will hire him to share the work. But Sung-chul retorts that his bosses won’t hire Man-soo to help. Instead, they just fire Sung-cheol.

“No Other Choice” also touches on concerns about AI-related job destruction. In Mance’s final interview in the film, the committee said that employers are using automation and are planning layoffs soon. Mance could only laugh and admit, “Of course. Can you go against the times?”

Spoiler alert: Mance ends up getting a job where he is the only human among many machines in a sterile factory. He celebrated, pumping his fist before settling into resigned acceptance, his expression haunting. At this moment, we see that his prize is a disastrous task and that it is probably headed for obsolescence.

Even traditional indicators of career success, such as landing a long-desired job, can be disappointing.

“Send Help” sees that disappointment at work. The film is a female rage movie with a workplace twist, where a fed up woman finally explodes to dangerous effect.

Worker bee Linda Riddle (Rachel McAdams) is stripped of promotions, stolen credit for her work, and otherwise grapples with a toxic workplace culture steeped in peer culture, all orchestrated by her terrible 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 take revenge for his actions.

That’s “the fantasy of everyone who has been treated unfairly at work,” Grundy said.

When Bradley was exercising power as CEO over Linda, who had hit a glass ceiling in the company’s boys’ club, the power relationship and gender roles that the two had in the office were clearly reversed. On the island, “Survivor” contestant Riddle hunts boars to protect them, feed them and literally bring home the bacon, while a grumpy Bradley tries to spell “HELP” in the sand, but only “HEPL” works.

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

In both films, the protagonists are disillusioned with the existing systems for finding, keeping, and succeeding in jobs, and believe that their only hope lies outside of these systems. Of course, Mance commits extrajudicial murder. At one point, Linda hid from the rescue team, fearing that the Bradleys of the world would return to society where they would trample on Linda’s family.

She ends “Send Help” with some depressingly bold advice: “Help isn’t coming, so you better start saving yourself.”

In the real world, workers and job seekers don’t see results as dramatic or conclusive as Mance and Linda appear on screen. But some people find themselves stuck in positions they’re unhappy with, or feel like they’re sending their applications into a black hole.

Grandi says there are “big tectonic shifts” happening in the market and in the world, “and that’s making everyone feel job insecure.”

When we can empathize with the main characters’ struggles, Grundy added, “we feel more in control and more empowered because we can feel like them for those two hours.” “Then we have to go back to our normal lives, but we hold on to a little bit of that power.”

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or have any mental health symptoms, please contact our free and confidential National Mental Health Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).