At the core of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy — a trio of thematically linked, tenaciously violent thrillers that flung the South Korean critic-turned-auteur into the international spotlight in the early-mid 2000s — lies an age-old question with a built-in answer: is revenge the right thing? And if it is, will it truly bring peace once the grisly terms of its acquisition are finally met? I say built-in because the answer is often deeply ingrained in — even downright axiomatic to — the kind of movie you’re watching. In a Quentin Tarantino film, known for their heroic bloodshed and arch, spectacular gore, the answer (however thorny or problematized) is a resounding, splashy “yes.” In the Sergio Leone Westerns he habitually borrows from, however, the grand guignol violence is rendered with an operatic remove, allowing the audience to feel every shuddering climax of Ennio Morricone’s score and mythic crack of a pistol while still retaining a charged ambivalence past the final reel. Ambivalence is a handy tool for anyone looking to sidestep ethical dilemmas, but it’s also an increasingly undervalued (and increasingly rare) one. Park’s toolbelt has no room for it, and across the three films he laboriously serves up the most accurate, and therefore least interesting, answer to that immortal puzzler: “no.” But this stance on revenge is actually beside the point; the Vengeance trilogy, in spite of its name and reputation, isn’t really about vengeance in any substantive way. The moral quandary is a fake-out, an excuse to elaborate compulsively and fatuously on Park’s actual pet theme: cruelty — how it’s enacted, performed, systematized, and narrativized.
A major throughline between the three films is the lengths a parent will go to for their child. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance both incorporate a child-napping gone wrong — the former’s is the main thrust of the narrative action while the latter’s is merely a jumping off point. Sympathy follows a deaf-mute factory worker Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), who kidnaps his ex-boss’s young daughter with his girlfriend Yeong-mi (Bae Doona) to pay for his dying, unnamed sister’s kidney transplant. The events that led them to this point are just as important as the ones that succeed it: the hospital tells him that their blood-types don’t match and all he can do is sit and wait for a suitable donor, so Ryu takes all of his savings and goes to a group of black-market organ dealers to swap his organ for a matching one. He wakes up shortly thereafter with no money, no clothes, and one less kidney. As if that weren’t enough, the hospital has some great news: a kidney has become available with unprecedented speed, and they can get his sister into surgery as soon as Ryu gives them that money he’d been saving. This sets the tone for the rest of the film: a set of sadistic plot turns that function like elaborate Rube-Goldberg-machines for human suffering and destitution, tinged with the same irony and deific contrivance as their more directly fatal, schlocky counterparts in James Wong’s Final Destination.
At every turn Park throws a wrench in the works that leaves his characters bruised, battered, and beaten by circumstance; the kidnapping itself goes remarkably well, with Ryu and Yeong-mi managing to hold the girl hostage without the knowledge that she’s a prisoner. The girl’s father Dong-jin (Song Kang-ho) delivers the money as planned, but upon Ryu’s return home he finds his sister — shocked to discover their crime and no longer wishing to be a burden — has killed herself. It might be hyperbole to call her suicide the most arbitrary act anyone has committed in a Park Chan-wook film, and also the most self-aggrandizing narrative rug the director has ever pulled, but it’s damn close on both counts. Borderline catatonic and completely wracked with grief and guilt, Ryu drives to a lake to bury her body, where the girl falls into the water and drowns as he looks the other way, unable to hear the commotion. The final hour of the film follows Dong-jin’s brutish and bilious acts of revenge on the guilt-ridden couple, barreling through other nihilistic detours before reaching its fatal-for-all-parties conclusion. Park flirts with self-awareness in regard to his cynical machinations, often playing out scenes of mental or bodily wreckage for morose comedic effect (for example, the staccato slapstick of Ryu’s full-body jolt when he touches the electrified doorknob), but in Sympathy they feel like empty winks easily subsumed into the larger framework.
In theory, such a framework — in which acts of incompetence or iniquity are punished just as ludicrously as ones of kindness and empathy — could be (and has been) the foundation of a great movie, but Park fails to properly square the glib shocks with the humanity of his characters. It’s long been said that directors Joel and Ethan Coen hate the expertly caricatured ne’er-do-wells and sensitive oafs that populate their work — J. Hoberman claims that a “robust disdain for their characters is a given” — but this belies how lovingly and carefully shaded the characters actually are. On the other hand, no one could ever accuse the brothers of cheaply wringing pity from their cruel pasquinades (except perhaps in their career-low short Meal Ticket in the otherwise-excellent omnibus-western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). This is the problem with Sympathy, which makes many gestures toward the Coens — an influence Park would iron out to much greater effect in his outrageous vampire sex dramedy Thirst — but mistakes sympathy, and the occasional weak, sardonic chuckle, for emotional depth and relatability.
It’s not until Lady Vengeance that he starts to textually and formally unpack how cruelty is weaponized in his narratives; instead of wielding the death of a captive child as a mid-film crescendo, it relegates it to an offscreen tragedy that sets the terms of the narrative and controls the fate of the title character. Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) becomes pregnant as a teenager and seeks refuge with a teacher, Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), who expects sex and assistance in kidnapping a six-year-old boy in return. Mr. Baek smothers the child and kidnaps Geum-ja’s daughter, forcing her to take the murder rap. The detective in charge of the case is sceptical that she could have committed such an act, so he has her restage the child’s murder as reporters gather around in a giddy frenzy of overlapping shouts and flashing lights. She takes hidden cues from Mr. Baek in the crowd — how to tie the dummy’s hands, and the right pillow to do the deed with –– before adding a dose of her own dramatic flair, slamming the pillow down with such gusto that the reporters are practically climbing over each other to get a closer look. Park tops it off with the dummy’s head popping loose from the pressure, along with a crash zoom on Geum-ja face, which perfectly balances murderous exultation with the fear and vulnerability it conceals. It’s a wonderfully orchestrated series of money-shots that articulate a hyperbolic cruelty, all under the watchful, eager eye of the cameras and the public.
It’s wonderfully self-aware, in some ways revising the determinist antics of Sympathy, and while Lady Vengeance falls into many of the same traps as its predecessor, it makes good on this potential autocritique later in the film when the parents of Mr. Baek’s victims are watching tapes of their children bound, near death, and screaming for their help: “Mommy, where are you?” and the like. The videos are horrible — made all the more immediate and bracing by the pixelated VHS imagery and snuff-film-adjacent shaky cam — and strike a raw, intimate nerve that Park would never aim for again. They’re only made worse when Geum-ja reveals to the bereaved that their children were already dead by the time they received the ransom tapes, because Mr. Baek couldn’t stand kids. Not only do the parents witness the victims’ suffering and distress through a television screen, like the audience, but what they’re seeing is long dead. Cinema is a medium of expiration and ghosts conjured through images made immortal, and Park tips his hat to this fact through the parents’ responses to the footage; their long-buried grief floods back, and still visibly inhabits every muscle in their bodies even after their elaborate, gruesome catharsis is achieved.
It’s this catharsis — which Geum-ja displaces onto and shares with the grieving parents instead of killing the man herself — that somewhat mirrors the complex, sticky sense of release that an audience feels when watching revenge films; a filmmaker often does the same by evoking the more difficult emotions felt watching an evildoer get their comeuppance in the viewer to make them complicit in the action. It’s in this sense that revenge stories provide a sense of communion, where a protagonist breaks the boundary of the screen to share their emotions and actions with us. Lady Vengeance creates a collective that functions first as spectators and then as agents of justice, mimicking and slaking the audience’s thirst for righteous sadism before showing, through a wonderfully drawn-out “celebration” scene in a bakery, the emptiness that remains when all the crunching, hacking, snapping, and slashing is over and done with.
This emptiness accumulates throughout the bludgeoning runtime of Oldboy, the second film in the trilogy which sticks out like a sore thumb when sandwiched between its comparatively tame (and far less seen) companions. Oldboy trades Sympathy’s meek class subtext and Lady Vengeance’s tactfully underplayed feminism for flagrant macho bluster and all-consuming masochism, giving into every histrionic pop impulse Park has, for better and mostly worse. The infamous brutality and twist-heavy plotting are numbing as opposed to stimulating, undone by Park’s oddly demure cutting and too-clean action sensibilities. Fight scenes are either shot in awkward, stilted long takes that admirably lampoon the outsized male egos that bounce across the screen or, in much more exciting form, spliced into fetishistic close-ups that stretch an action as simple as a hammer being brought down on an expectant skull to satisfyingly excessive length, in that case topping it off with the sight gag of a dotted line drawing the arc from hand to forehead. Because this is Park Chan-wook — whose lush style and salacious sensibilities provide no shortage of flirtatiously engineered carnage — there’s an inherent excitement in watching how all of his kinks will play out, but he gets in his own way, either lingering too long or giddily bounding toward the next mutilation without letting the impacts sink in. At a certain point there’s only so much juvenile laceration one can take before tedium sets in.
Lady Vengeance stands in stark contrast to its predecessors, not just in its relative (depictive) restraint but also its frequent emotional intelligence and maturity, which can likely be attributed to the contributions of first-time co-scribe Chung Seo-kyung, whose consistent presence throughout Park’s more recent crop of pulp fictions should not be overlooked. There remain a few startling eruptions of body fluids, but for the most part Park’s cruel intentions are expounded through a more strategically (and effectively) withheld approach. Lady Vengeance’s brutality is achieved through horrors both implied and purposely blunted, and the viewer’s revulsion is often earned by showing how the bloodletting can manifest on an actor’s face; either twisted into affronted, traumatized knots or gnarled, sadistic spasms — often from the same character. This technique achieves far greater depths of mirthless depravity, and inversely, that ever-elusive sympathy, but it also trades a sensory experience for an intellectual one once it reaches its most intriguing, but ultimately self-defeating, ethical conceit: that of the organized, shared execution of a serial killer by his indirect victims.
Sympathy has this same issue of outsized intellect in spite of its pointed excesses — the two impulses weave into one portentous, scolding thread in a way that recalls Michael Haneke at his worst. Here, Park lingers and luxuriates, the most succinct case being the static long takes through which he captures Yeong-mi’s torture and murder at the hands of Dong-jin; a sheet of cloth conceals the effects the electric shocks have on her body, but her screams — and the convulsive movements of the sheet itself — tell us all we need to know. This kind of self-conscious “restraint” (which in reality constitutes dragging out acts of moral turpitude to stupefying length) amounts to the same tacky, hateful finger-wagging that punctuates both versions of Funny Games, Haneke’s twin lectures on screen violence. But applied to your typical revenge narrative, the moralizing normally directed at the character(s) is instead directed at the audience, and more specifically the sense of catharsis we feel upon watching gruesome justice take its course. But, of course, these particular objects of revenge don’t deserve it, and all You The Viewer can do is sit there and think about what you’ve done.
This particular intertextual evocation is even more amusing considering Park’s extensive pastiche Brian De Palma, a seasoned pervert with boundless formal energy and ingenuity but almost no moral compass to speak of. This sounds like a knock, but it’s far preferable, and far purer, than Park’s stale dialectic of titillation and ethical sobriety. Not that De Palma doesn’t have points to make or axes to grind — Blow Out, my favourite of his handful of masterpieces, metabolizes the previous decade’s conspiracy thrillers and crossbreeds them with the visual and structural language of all manner of exploitation films, making the “ultimate statement” on American life in the ‘80s through little else but image and sound. At the end of the day though, it’s a sweeping romantic tragedy and ripping thriller, because De Palma always knew to prioritize his generic frameworks over any larger statements he built over top of them. At this point in Park’s career his only interest is — ironically, given where the films end up — in the sensorial aspects of De Palma’s cinema: split-screens, swooping and arcing virtuoso camera movements, lacerating zooms, and dizzying temporal futzing that complicates his clockwork narratives to varying effect.
Sympathy is most De Palmian in its pithy, abrupt cuts which obfuscate and syncopate major events, spasmodically injecting some much-needed frissons into an otherwise sluggish dirge. Oldboy would be successful in its bestial flare if not for Park’s competing impulses to offend and please his audience, holding our hands through every narrative machination but also trying to waterboard us with a series of ratcheting, but increasingly deflating, shocks. The third installment certainly bears the same swooning artifice as its predecessors, but the chain of influence extends for the first time back to De Palma’s own repeat influence Alfred Hitchcock (who would be more explicitly referenced in Park’s later for-hire film Stoker, a self-aware riff on Shadow of a Doubt). Lady Vengeance bears some traces of the Master of Suspense’s shocking, devastating late-period masterwork Marnie, an unwieldy crime-melodrama about a traumatized woman trading a psychic prison for a sexual one that doubles as a disturbing confessional of Hitchcock’s predatorial behaviour toward lead actress Tippi Hedren.
It’s this perfusive mixture of guilt and insatiable hunger in Hitchock’s ever-sensuous camera that trickles into Lady Vengeance’s narrative, if not entirely its form. Coming off of the more histrionic, arguably misogynist antics of Oldboy, the later film feels to some degree reactionary, and the inner tension of Park’s attempts to restrain himself make the eventual outbursts all the more rewarding. The key difference between the films is that Hitchcock’s ends on a note of performative resolution, an image of an irreparably shattered woman embracing the man who bullied and raped her, doomed to cycle through her traumas until her brain collapses in on itself. Lady Vengeance introduces, for the first time, the possibility of redemption and recovery for a Park protagonist, and ends with the path forward clearly marked but not quite walked.
Such a resolution signals growth for a director so easily consumed by his punishment fetish, which up until this point determined the shape of his films. His third feature Joint Security Area — widely regarded as his debut since the director apparently went to great lengths to see his first two films buried from public view — is a political thriller about the tensions between North and South Korea being briefly overcome by a group of Hawksian pals whose precarious friendship is undone by poor timing and the loss of several contradependent cools. It’s a telling entry point into an early crop of films freckled by self-consciously performative shticks that crumble in ways both pitiable and triumphant, walking the line between compassion and schadenfreude. All three Vengeance films converge toward a particular façade dropping in spectacular, discomfiting fashion — a point where basic dignity is overcome by absolute degradation.
Sympathy’s is the least emotionally complicated — Ryu’s final scene in the river, in which his face contorts into shivers and sobs as he prepares to meet his maker, elicits a very immediate sense of pain at watching a fundamentally innocent person be murdered for thoroughly understandable reasons. Oldboy’s is grotesque, and of course, morbidly comic, as Choi Min-sik’s Oh Dae-su yowls and squirms and begs his tormentor Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae) not to tell his daughter (the woman he’s been canoodling throughout the film unawares) about their relation, licking the man’s shoe and then, for whatever reason, cutting off his own tongue with a pair of scissors. Lee relents before shooting himself, signing off on his 15-year plot with the same grief that originally fueled it. Oh Dae-su recruits a psychic to wipe his memory of the awful truth — whether his actions are for the sake of his child or entirely self-serving is left admirably vague, but by this point the disgust has been cranked too high for it to matter much. Choi Min-sik is degraded again throughout the entire second hour of Lady Vengeance, dragged out to such an extent that his character barely registers at all; he’s a cypher onto which his killers’ emotional and ethical transgressions are violently mapped as he huffs and puffs and begs pointlessly for mercy.
It’s fitting that such a hot air stylist’s early-career trademark would be faltering pretenses, since all of his aesthetic gusto can only take him so far. Not that his work lacks substance (style often is substance) — he too consciously strains for it in the traditional sense. His flirtations with metatext and sadism constantly suggest more honest — and genuinely substantive — filmmaking, but they’re too often pushed to the side to make room for some greater point about the violence on display. He has, however, exponentially grown as a filmmaker, apparent not only in the differences between Sympathy and Lady Vengeance, but through the gorgeously modulated tonal gymnastics, mean-spirited dramatic ironies, and fully-fledged and explored eroticism of Thirst and his near-masterpiece The Handmaiden. Whether this trajectory continues will be revealed with his latest film Decision to Leave, which won Best Director at the Cannes Festival and releases theatrically in October, and we’ll all watch closely as a gifted aesthetician once again walks his many trademark tightropes: between the silly and ghastly, the arousing and the revulsive, the tender and the macabre. Regardless of the outcome, sifting through all that gorgeous design and immaculate brocading to reveal the contents within remains a truly compelling prospect.
