Film Reviews

Lady Vengeance

• Rating:
• Director: Park Chan-Wook.
• Starring: Lee Young-ae, Choi Min-sik.
• Details: Korea, 115mins, 18s.

Beautiful 19-year-old Guem-Ja (Lee) becomes an infamous figure in the Korean media after abducting and suffocating a young boy. Although found guilty of this heinous act, she is covering up for the real killer; upon release from prison 13 years later, Guem-Ja sets about hunting down and confronting the man responsible - school teacher Mr. Baek (Old Boy's Min-sik Choi). In her meticulously plotted plan, the reformed Guem-Ja hopes to banish some ghosts of her dreadful past and make Mr. Baek pay for his horrible crimes. With Old Boy and Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance already in a formidable canon of work, Lady Vengeance is the third instalment in director Park's loose trilogy of revenge movies. Moving at a cracking pace and not stopping to see that everyone has caught up with the plot, Park jumps back and forth like a particularly paranoid and schizophrenic Mexican fighting frog between the present and the past, interspersed with revenge dream sequences. Guem-Ja comes across as a Myra Hindley character to Mr. Baek's Ian Brady and, in fact, those grisly Moors murders have a lot in common with the central theme of Lady Vengeance as children's snuff films are found in Mr. Baek's office. This is where the film takes a dark turn and never looks back but still Park finds some room to inject some tar-black humour when it has no right to be there, and still manages to make it work. That's just one example of a director who seems to scoff at conventional directing methods and has no qualms about fading to black in the middle of a scene. An 'eye for an eye' seems to be Park's judgement method, and worries not about the dehumanising aspect of revenge - it is what it is.

Review by Gavin Burke