everybody loses, nobody wins
revenge expression and a review of park chan-wook's "The Vengeance Trilogy"
2020. The world was in lockdown and I was stuck inside my parents’ home in Southern California after spending a month abroad at NYU Florence – exactly 30 days before being sent home. While inside I found myself watching up to three sometimes four movies a day, ranging from full-length features to indie Youtube short films. My first two years of undergrad were full of class, rehearsals, production meetings, homework, and then class again, which allowed for only a handful of trips to the movies during the school year. Fast forward and with this newfound government-mandated free time, I chugged my way through movies I had wanted to experience but never had the time (shoutout PopcornTime & 123Movies). I came back to the US in March 2020 and later returned to campus in August 2020, and within that time I was somehow able to watch over 250 movies. During my final week home before heading back to New York, I found the time to squeeze in one more movie: The Handmaiden by Park Chan-Wook. Little did I know I just inadvertently introduced myself to a new favorite director and new movie to force upon my friends.
who is Park Chan-Wook?
Park Chan-Wook stuns in new photo
Like many directors who came before him, Park did not originally study film before creating his first feature. During his time at Sogang University, he studied philosophy and was slated to become an art critic. It wasn’t until after a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that he realized that he wanted to be a filmmaker. Ironically, his first feature The Moon is…the Sun’s Dream (1992) is regarded by Park himself as his worst, later coupled by his second feature Trio (1997). Both ended up being box office and critical flops by Korean audiences, leading Park to eventually disown both movies. In a similar fashion to other directors who disown their early work, finding a physical or streaming copy of The Moon is… or Trio is very complicated and can only be done through E-Bay bartering. Park prefers it that way, as he recalls, “I made it when I was in my twenties and I had this blind ambition to basically make a film, so that’s how I got to make that film. And it was very low budget, and very sentimental, and it’s just very…you know…awful.” His later film Joint Security Area (2000) is personally regarded by Park as his feature debut with full creative control, later becoming the highest-grossing film in Korea at the time and winning Best Film and Best Cinematography at the Blue Dragon and Grand Bell Film Awards (the South Korean equivalents to the Academy Awards). This cemented Park’s place as a filmmaker and screenwriter in Korean cinema, with well-known Korean actors and producers ready to include themselves into Park’s creative visions. With his creative usage of dark humor in stories that include themes around philosophy, love triangles and the human condition, it was only a matter of time before Park made what would later be regarded as his magnum opus.
Enter, The Vengeance Trilogy.
love, death & revenge: the vengeance trilogy
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance are titles in the unofficially dubbed “Vengeance Trilogy.” Park did not originally give name onto the stream of films, however he purposely created them with common themes that tie them to each other without being directly sequential in story. While that is the case, each film has a unique story with desires of revenge and desperation for answers, while also including themes of love and complexity of the human spirit. In all three features, Park masterfully includes moments of dark humor to build trust in the audience and humanize our characters, before plummeting both spectator and character into a whirlwind of depressing conclusions. In other words, by the third act, ain’t SHIT funny.
Shin Ha-kyun as Ryu in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) is a psychological neo-noir thriller about how far a young man will go to save his sister before his idea go completely awry. Without going into spoilers, Ryu is a deaf-mute factory worker who develops a plan with his girlfriend to kidnap the daughter of the factory CEO in order to pay off his sister’s hospital bills. What happens later is for the audience to discover.
With this being the first film in the trilogy, Park had to come out swinging. While each movie has separate storylines, the overall idea of revenge within all three films has to be aligned in thematic imagery and writing. Mr. Vengeance was surprisingly polarizing for Korean audiences, with lucrative screenings happening in the United States over three years after the films initial debut in South Korea. Critics were split in how to decipher the overall meaning of the film, with the movie currently holding a 54% on Rotten Tomatoes and many calling it “overly gruesome,” including a 2005 review from G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle where he called the film a “waste.” Even though I understand where critics concerns lie and how some may have thought the film to be overly violent in nature, I found Mr. Vengeance to be a scathing interrogation of structures that put powerless civilians in precarious positions of survival, risking their lives and legal freedoms. When watched through a lens of current historical and social contexts, the conclusion becomes that much harsher. Even in 2000, a time we consider the cost of living to be much cheaper than it is now, it was still simply too expensive to thrive instead of survive. When a human is desperate to preserve the life they have always known, particularly when it comes to finances, what may be seen as extreme to most can quickly become ones reality. Ryu and his sister only have each other, which puts immense pressure on Ryu to ensure her health and recovery – even more so as she is one of the few people in the world who can properly communicate with Ryu while he is deaf-mute. Their sibling bond is deep and the audience immediately understands Ryu’s desperation to go to the last resort. His plans go south quickly and that desperation evolves into a deep desire for revenge, not just from him but from other side characters that are equally important to the story. Something I appreciate about Park is his insistence that every single character is important to the overall narrative, whether it be Ryu or the factory boss or his sister or a food delivery worker. Every single thread planted by Park comes to full fruition by the end with no stone left unturned. Overall, I greatly enjoyed watching this knowing that this is the first film where Park was able to enact full creative control, and I would recommend watching Mr. Vengeance third. Mr. Vengeance is not his weakest film by any means, but the two that followed cemented Park as an internationally-acclaimed director and visionary.
Choi Min-sik as Oh Dae-su in Oldboy
If I could go back and watch Oldboy (2003) for the first time I would do so in a heartbeat. AMC did a re-release of Oldboy in honor of the 20th-anniversary in 2023, and at the end of the movie I must’ve sat in my seat for at least five minutes after the credits began to roll. To say I was gagged is an understatement - I consider myself to be a pretty smart cookie who can usually predict the next move of a character or director, and how FOOLISH of me to think I could apply that same level of thinking to a film like this where no next move could be predicted.
Oldboy takes us into the life and psyche of Oh Dae-su, a father and regular guy who somehow finds himself at the center of a conspiracy full of jealousy, rumors and forbidden love. After being arrested for public drunkenness and getting picked up from the station by a good friend, he quickly disappears and wakes up in a sealed hotel room. The audience quickly learns that he is trapped in a hotel prison while Oh Dae-su tries to understand how he got there, and more importantly who put him there. After fifteen years in captivity, he is randomly released one day into a sadistic game of cat and mouse with an unknown presence who has been seemingly following and watching him the entire time, and potentially could be the person behind Oh Dae-su’s seemingly random imprisonment. And I cannot be more serious: what happens next can’t be spoken but simply must discovered. Out of all three movies, I urge everyone to watch this one first and in a group if possible. Two days after seeing it for the first time at AMC, I took one of my best friends to see it at IFC. She loved it.
Not only is Oldboy considered one of the greatest films ever made, but it’s also regarded as the blueprint for action films that came after. I love and appreciate movies that have good stories and good action even if I’m not the biggest fan of the genre. Too many action movies have what I consider to be bad action – it could be for technical reasons or poor choreography or horrible acting, but overall what separates good versus bad for me is if the fight scenes or general violence feels senseless or unearned. I’ve seen a good handful of action movies, and thankfully I can say most of them have organic action in conjunction with cohesive story development. Movies & anthologies like The Matrix (1999), John Wick (2014), and most recently Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man (2024) have great sequences and the intense stakes to back up the violence. In my perfect world, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is the spiritual successor to Oldboy, with Dev himself citing Park and Oldboy as inspirations. There’s a scene halfway through where Oh Dae-su fights a group of at least fifteen henchmen in a hallway corridor done in one continuous take. With the proximity the camera has to the actors and the overall pacing of the scene, Park places us right alongside Oh Dae-su as he takes on all the henchmen by himself with nothing but a hammer. The energy of the fight increases and decreases naturally throughout the entire four minute sequence, including multiple moments where it seemed like Oh Dae-su wouldn’t win. But of course, since we still had 95 minutes and some change left of the movie, he wins and continues his odyssey. Every fight scene in Oldboy feels earned and vital to Oh Dae-su’s character development, and as was the case with Mr. Vengeance, every side character in the movie is equally important and necessary. One thing I find interesting about Park’s approach to Oh Dae-su and his protagonists entirely is how he undercuts the general binary way of thinking of the good versus bad person. On the surface, Oh Dae-su is not a good man: he misses his daughter’s fourth birthday at the start of the movie due to his arrest for public drunkenness, he steals a woman’s sunglasses in a moment of elevator sexual desperation, he ties up his love interest Mi-do against her wishes after she spent the entire first half of the movie tending to his wounds - truth be told, the list goes on. He is the exact opposite to what a normal protagonist would be written as and who we as the audience would root for. And yet, one of the most poignant lines of the film really sums up what Park is saying about complex personal humanity altogether:
“Even though I’m no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?”
Never has a movie so quickly become a favorite with permanent residency on the letterboxd profile. If you end up watching only one of the three movies, let it be this one (and for the love of god STAY AWAY FROM THE AMERICAN REMAKE).
Lee Young-ae as Lee Geum-ja in Lady Vengeance
Since women get fucked over too, it only makes sense for Park to include a film in the trilogy that centers around a woman and her lust for vengeance - at the very core, men and women have different reactions and needs for revenge, largely due to societal privileges related to gender. This is something Park understands as he released the final installment in the Vengeance Trilogy.
Lady Vengeance (2005) introduces us to Lee Geum-ja in the days following her release from thirteen years in prison for the alleged kidnapping and murder of a five-year old schoolboy. At the start of the film, we see her days in prison with the other femme inmates as she builds “friendships” in order to further her revenge plans. Once we’re brought back to the present day, we see Geum-ja on a mission to acquire a custom pistol to fully execute her means: a very sexy double-chambered pistol. In trying to keep the main plot points under wraps, what can be said is if there were ever a movie that relied heavily on side characters to justify the story of our protagonist, it would be this one. As with the first two films, Geum-ja eventually exacts her revenge, and the final scene leaves the audience with a small pocket of hope for the future of Geum-ja and the people she loves.
With this movie relying the least on fights and intense action sequences, the violence that we do see in Lady Vengeance is deeply interpersonal unlike Mr. Vengeance, and to a lesser extent, Oldboy. Mr. Vengeance follows our lead in fighting against unknown or uncontrollable forces outside of his interpersonal circles. Ryu doesn’t personally know the factory CEO or the daughter he plans to kidnap. At the start of Oldboy, Oh Dae-su continuously asks himself who he knows that would want to hold such a long-lasting grudge against him, with the thought looming over him like a ghost and eventually becoming very personal. From the moment we meet Geum-ja in Lady Vengeance, she lets us know that this beef runs deep, deeper than what we as the audience can even imagine. Park expertly combines sardonic irony with compelling story through characters like Geum-ja’s long lost daughter Jenny. Every character is woven into one another and every decision they make influences the other, with the third act becoming a full manifestation of Geum-ja’s imaginations. Oldboy is definitely my favorite of the three, but Lady Vengeance runs a very close second simply from how much I was entertained and felt surprisingly seen – this movie is for the bad bitches who love pistols and got some shit they need off their chest. A fab selection for a group movie night.
revenge as an emotion and action
The Vengeance Trilogy, while entirely fictional, emphasizes a very common emotion that drives us into action. With rage being a taboo emotion to discuss, the general concept of revenge is thereby underrepresented in topics of discourse. The trilogy itself was released within the years 2002-2005, during intense political downturn and global affairs, including the continued invasions of Iraq and Syria in the aftermath of 9/11 – a clip of which can be seen during a time pass sequence in Oldboy. Each film acts as a time capsule for world events at the turn of the millennium, in both South Korean and international politics. With previous current events surrounding the world of each movie, it makes sense how each protagonist responds to the realities of their lives due to systems and governments out of their control. In a recent real-world scenario, the shooting and death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson illustrated a common anger felt by the majority of Americans covered by the insurance conglomerate. The immediate aftermath of Thompson’s death was riddled with story after story from individuals and families who were continuously denied life-saving coverage and care directly at the hands of United and it’s CEO, including the alleged killer Luigi Mangione and his own history of back pain following a spinal surgery from a previous injury. Although Mangione was never a patient insured by United, they and many other insurance companies thrive on denying care and coverage to individuals who desperately need it. Truthfully, it was only a matter of time before an event like this were to occur. Keep in mind: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was released in 2002. Brian Thompson was sniped in 2024. Given the current political and economic state of our country, he won’t be the only or last one.
The Vengeance Trilogy forces us to reckon with our own feelings of destruction, particularly when pointed towards another person or entity. Separate in nature but similar in story, the trilogy highlights the desperation and fear felt by all of us as victims of continued late-stage capitalism, and the consequences from following through on action to improve one’s quality of life. Nobody wins and everybody loses (Lady Vengeance being the only slight exception), but ultimately we are the ones who are going to save ourselves from desires of revenge. Well, either us or death.
Park Chan-wook, please never change. My reviews for each movie & ranking can be found ☆here☆
