Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Directed by Park Chan-wook
A deaf man and his girlfriend resort to desperate measures in order to fund a kidney transplant for his sister. Things go horribly wrong, and the situation spirals rapidly into a cycle of violence and revenge.
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What critics compared Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance to
Korean director Park Chan-wook explored this theme thoroughly in a trilogy bookended by 2002’s Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and 2005’s Lady Vengeance, and epitomized by the 2003 cult smash Oldboy, a mega-revenge tale set to an operatic pitch.
Operating in a dreamy vein that's far less gruesome than his renowned "vengeance trilogy" (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy , Lady Vengeance), Park makes no gestures toward reality.
Stoker also represents a life change for Park, who makes his English-language debut after long winning raves from international genre fans for his precise images and explicit violence, best known for his payback trio that began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in 2002.
Not as well as in any of the director's earlier films, certainly; its violent gestures are neither as visually poetic nor as morally unsettling as anything that shows up in a Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance , or certainly an Oldboy , and those films had involving characters in addition to being exercises in visceral style as justification for itself.
Quite simply, Stoker is challenging, haunting and hypnotic- pretty much everything you'd want from a film helmed by the man behind the cult classics Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.
South Korean filmmaker and critical darling Park Chan-wook is best known for his Vengeance Trilogy, the early-Aughties run of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance.
Vengeance in Park’s movies is a loaded topic, as you can tell from the titles of two of his most acclaimed works, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance.
Revenge, in all its forms and for all its purposes, is the unifying thread of Park’s entire body of work, from the obvious titles—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance—to the more inconspicuous oddities in his oeuvre, like I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay, a cutesy rom-com that still manages to be vengeful in its own way.
Park is the auteur behind some critically lauded and exceedingly cruel quasi-horror films, among them Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and the English-language Stoker.
When we first discovered Park's work in such films as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Thirst, his eye-poppingly weird tableaux made sense as embellishment on his themes.
…director Park treading similar territory to earlier works like class caper Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance…