The beleaguered job seeker is a long standing trope in South Korean culture, one that has only intensified in the 21st century as young people seek secure office positions in a difficult modern, internationally minded economy. On Sept. 30, Reawaken Man: The Red (2026) offered a new twist on the harried archetype, with its title character in the midst of his fruitless job search discovering that he has the power to revive himself. The unusually advanced age of the leading man, Koo Kyo-hwan, who is in his early forties, also represents a noteworthy evolution of a trend that seems to creep across more and more of the South Korean population.

Reawaken Man: The Red (2026)

Older faces showing this kind of desperation are not new. Though well into his thirties by the time Exit (2019) started filming, leading man Cho Jung-seok was still perfectly capable of giving off the sort of quiet desperation (or loud, if the situation called for it) that marks the anxieties of job seekers all over the peninsula. The sheer length during which these trends have been ongoing, however, has added a bleakness which was not present in 2019. No Other Choice (2025) from director Park Chan-wook came out just last year and punctuated the dark comedy of these situations with veteran actor Lee Byung-hun in the leading role as an older man so desperate for a job that he starts literally murdering the competition.

No Other Choice (2025)

Levity is still possible even with older job seekers, as is seen with The Intern (2026), also from September of this year, starring Choi Min-sik as the quintessentially grumpy old man who’s able to teach new dogs in the industry some old tricks. Once upon a time there was more of a novelty to the idea of success at the office, and how ambitious Koreans might be able to find a way forward. Choi Min-sik was only six years old when A Man and a Gisaeng (1968) came out in 1968, the screwball genderbending comedy also serving as a demonstration of the usefulness of these kinds of generic business skills.

The Intern (2026)

But the South Korea of today is a comparatively bleak marketplace. When 10 Minutes (2013) premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in the New Currents section in 2013, its viability as a New Current was indisputable. It was made by a younger generation of filmmakers all too familiar with how the once lauded office job had become a poisoned chalice. South Koreans wanted economic security, and these jobs were the way to get it, but they have long been plagued by outright nepotism. The title of the film refers to all the time the main character gets to consider whether after everything he’s seen, he still wants the job he’s been clamoring for over the film’s runtime.

His dilemma, marked by realism and ambiguity, at least doesn’t succumb to the outright murderous, which is what happens to the lead of the 2015 film The Office (2015) which wasn’t exactly a subtle social commentary, giving that involves genre elements like serial killers. But it still underscores how for most South Korean people today, offices are no longer safe spaces. They’re inherently cutthroat. Even the Misaeng phenomenon of the 2010s, based around the webtoon of that title, is primarily a story about careful strategizing in the workplace. What the job actually entails is beside the point. Though most famous as a webtoon, Misaeng did get a prequel movie in 2013, and was also adapted into a successful South Korean drama.

The Office (2015)

Where’s the romance in the office? Well, for the most part, it’s on television. While South Korean television dramas frequently make use of the mixed workplace, as a setting, it’s rather underutilized in film romances. Why? My suspicion is because it’s a different form of escapism. The workplace, after all, is a long grind wherever a person happens to be, and the office is a slow accumulation of all the various tensions eventually leading to something more. Cinematic romance, which by nature must be brief, can’t easily reproduce that sort of long-standing tension.

There’s also a darker element at play with the office in regard to romance that tends to crop up more in film than in television, and that’s less about romance than it is about sex. The long suffering office worker is often expected to survive his monotony with drinks with colleagues after hours. Indeed, A Man and a Gisaeng mentioned earlier is explicitly premised around the goofiness inherent in its cross-dressing lead running across colleagues that do not recognize him. This general separation of spheres resonates even in movies like Intimate Strangers (2018) from 2018, which don’t feature office environments, but do make a point of how public, private, and personal lives are all very different things.

Can we really call any of this South Korean culture specifically? The whole salaryman archetype derives from Japan, and South Korea has a very similar kind of culture, of office space with East Asian values. But two of the movies I’ve mentioned here, The Intern and Intimate Strangers, are in fact remakes of an American and an Italian film respectively. The increasingly universally applicable nature of the environment can often make it difficult to spot the exact nuances by which the South Korean employment environment differs from those anywhere else.

This might be why the office is easier to integrate into a clearly South Korean work of fiction by means of motivation, rather than as a setting in and of itself. Take A Single Rider (2017) from 2017, which deals primarily with the lead’s anxiety about his emotional distance from his wife, due to his job requiring extremely long hours, to the point that she and their daughter have moved to Australia if only because it’s not like they see him in South Korea anyway. This sense of the overseas being a possible escape from the office doesn’t just apply to the family of office workers. Or, for that matter, to the realm of fiction. Farming Boys (2017) from 2017 is just one of many documentaries about people yearning for escape from the idealized South Korean career path, even if it means going overseas into a comparably rustic, low-paid field like farming.

Not that the going overseas part is an entirely necessary part of this particular trend. Little Forest (2018) from 2018 is another example of romanticization of the natural world if only because it has the advantage of not being an office. Yet this, too, once again leads us to the discomforting realization that the office isn’t quite so quintessentially a South Korean conception of modernity as we might think. Little Forest is, after all, based on a Japanese film based on a Japanese comic.

Written by William Schwartz
Edited by KOFIC