Lady Vengeance (2005)
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Released after being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 13 years, a woman begins executing her elaborate plan of retribution.
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What critics compared Lady Vengeance to
Like Jung’s earlier effort, The Villainess can trace its lineage to another Korean New Wave classic, Park’s 2005 film Lady Vengeance .
The American debut of kind-to-be-cruel South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (“Old Boy,” “Lady Vengeance”), based on a script by the actor Wentworth Miller (“Prison Break”) with rewrites by Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”) is a brisk, chilly variation on themes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” but it never finds a convincing shape of its own.
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.
His celebrated “Vengeance’’ trilogy — “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’’ (2002), “Oldboy’’ (2003), and “Lady Vengeance’’ (2005) — inhabit a zone triangulated by crime films, psychological suspense, and hair-raising horror, but they also have a rarefied chill that renders them fit for the art house.
The narrative elements of Stoker are familiar enough from numerous other psychodramas and gothic tales of family madness, but the film works because Park and his regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, who have now collaborated on six films, including two of the “Vengeance Trilogy” (2003’s Oldboy and 2006’s Lady Vengeance), give the film such a memorable air of fairy-tale menace.
The Korean cult director of the terrific "Oldboy," "Lady Vengeance" and "Thirst" is hardly known for restraint, but the schematic of "Stoker" (aka the too-knowing script by Wentworth Miller ) thwarts him technically.
It’s a riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943, Hitchcock’s favorite film), scripted by actor Wentworth Miller and directed by South Korean Chan-wook Park of the cult fave “Vengeance” trilogy (“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy,” “Lady Vengeance”).
(The other two episodes: 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and 2003's Oldboy.)
In terms of formal control and sheer filmmaking prowess, Korean director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) is so far out in front of his contemporaries that it isn't even funny.
Vastly different in tone from "Oldboy," if only because of the gender of the lead, Park Chanwook's follow-up is often too odd and disjointed for its own good.
Park completes his vengeance trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy ) with Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, wherein, for arguably the first time, he contemplates a real psychic cost of avenging unimaginable losses, discovering, at the end of three films' worth of perverse bloodshed and genuinely Greek atrocity a better definition for the idea of Grace.
Any movie that includes canine gunning automatically gets on my bad side, but the moment is meant as one of many interweaving motifs in Park's universe, like the way the same characters (or at least the same actors) keep leaping from film to film (Choi Min-sik, the anguished avenger from Oldboy, plays the murderer this time around).
Most Bay Area fans probably started with the second episode, Oldboy (2003), followed by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002).
After winning a major prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, “Oldboy” cemented Park’s international reputation as well as his fixation with spectacles of bloody and convoluted revenge (see also “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Lady Vengeance,” with which “Oldboy” forms a trilogy).
There have been many words used to describe Park Chan-wook, the Korean filmmaker responsible for such wild cinematic provocations as “Thirst,” “Stoker” and his internationally acclaimed revenge-themed trilogy consisting of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance,” but “staid” and “straightforward” are not two of them.
They're the foundation on which his reputation rests, for better or worse, and Park's The Handmaiden is of a piece with such previous pics as Oldboy and Lady Vengeance.
Like most of Park’s films, the fine art of erotic manipulation is gleefully on display in The Handmaiden—as are the usual host of patriarchal perversities and fetishes—but the film has an affecting emotional core that signals a welcome new direction in Park’s work: one that eschews the shock value he’s become famous for with films like Oldboy and Lady Vengeance in favor of a slightly more delicate approach to character.
Nightmare monger Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) skillfully transplants the Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith, about Victorian grifters preying on the aristocracy, to his native South Korea during the Japanese occupation.
After the Hitchcockian twists and skin-prickling Freudian symbolism of his first English-language feature Stoker , Park returns to the grand theatricality of his “Vengeance Trilogy” (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) with this fugue-like romp, which is by turns bitingly wry and pleasingly ribald.
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Song Kang-ho, who portrays an engineer helping the rebels, appeared in Park's "Lady Vengeance" and "The Host."
Park Chan-wook—of Oldboy, Thirst and Lady Vengeance—flopped with Stoker, an elegant but ultimately cold thriller.
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.
Principle titles include Chan-wook Park’s trilogy, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance (2002), Cannes Grand Prize winner Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005), as well as Kim Jee-Woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005).