Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Chan-wook Park, 2002)

Chan-wook Park’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is undoubtedly the work of a very talented – if still developing – director. Sure, Park has not yet perfected the craft (he still sometimes pushes things too far by allowing time for stylized shots that don’t do much other than look cool or visual jokes that just don’t work), but the reason why Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ultimately succeeds is because of the details in Park’s filmmaking and his ability to breathe fresh life into these scenes. Moments such as when our lead character Ryu remains frozen in motion, standing in a knee’s worth of water, while transfixed on the lifeless body of a girl floating in the lake are spellbinding and show the patience that is far too infrequent in films today. Here the story centers around Ryu, a deaf-mute boy who is desperate to find a kidney donor for his dying sister. He does everything he can think of, trying to donate his own and even buy one off the black market, but all that he manages to do is get himself robbed (they even take his kidney). When a donor is finally found, Ryu no longer has the money for the surgery and in an act of easily-persuaded desperation (from a revolutionary-minded friend), he decides to kidnap and ransom his former boss’ child to get it. From there the film heads full steam into a revenge-fueled bloodbath, entirely without sympathy or forgiveness. And in a moment of story structure genius, the focus of the film switches to the father of the little girl, abandoning our kidnappers at just the moment they become irredeemable. These are largely ‘good’ people that get caught up in something heinous, but can there be mercy? Was it not Gandhi that said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?” Maybe in some blood-soaked, bash-your-head-in-with-a-baseball-bat way, this is saying the same thing? There are no happy endings for the vengeful-hearted.