Sympathy For Mr Vengeance A Look Back At Park Chan Wook S 2002 Thriller

It’s a little hard to believe, but it’s been 20 years since the release of Park Chan-wook’s influential thriller, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Not only did it change the course of the director’s career, kicking off his renowned Vengeance Trilogy, it brought South Korean cinema to the global stage in a whole new way. So how did this grim, nihilistic film from 2002 come to have such an impact in terms of world cinema? It was not a straightforward path.

Park Chan-wook’s Pre-Vengeance Career

     CJ Entertainment  

To really take a look at the impact of the film, we’re going to go back a little further than 20 years, at Park’s trajectory as a director. Initially he had planned to be a film critic, but a viewing of Hitchock’s Vertigo caused him to change his mind and pursue a more hands-on film career. His early directorial efforts (The Moon is…the Sun’s Dream and Trio) were not especially successful, and he still relied on his film criticism to get by. In 2000, he directed Joint Security Area, about a shooting in the DMZ between North and South Korea, and was launched into the South Korean spotlight as it was the most viewed film of its time. Which gave him more creative freedom when it came time for his next venture.

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance boasts an all-star cast, starring Parasite’s Song Kang-ho as a desperate father, Save the Green Planet’s Shin Ha-kyun as a deaf-mute man struggling to take care of his terminally ill sister, and The Host’s Bae Doona as a somewhat bloodthirsty anarchist (although the films that brought these actors to the attention of American audiences were all post-Mr. Vengeance). But it’s not your typical thriller. Its unrelentingly dismal plot, about a man whose life continuously seems like it can’t get worse, and then does, didn’t cause audiences to warm to it, and it didn’t do great at the box office. There’s kidnapping, the black market organ trade, cancer, and constant violence. But it has fascinating opinions on the theory of revenge: who deserves it, who gets it. And the performances are outstanding. To this day, it has a middling Rotten Tomatoes score, but it also won a number of Korean film awards, and hopefully the 20-year anniversary will inspire audiences to give it another, much-deserved chance.

Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005)

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a fantastic film in its own right, but it’s probably best known for paving the way for the second installment of the Vengeance Trilogy, Oldboy. It came out just a year later, and was a total breath of fresh air in terms of thriller films. The story of a man imprisoned by an unknown captor for 15 years, then just as inexplicably released, is visually stunning, perfectly cast, and its Oedipal overtones put it on a different level than what audiences were used to at the time, rote action thrillers churned out by Hollywood. Need we mention the continuous take fight scene? Park followed up the Cannes Grand Prix-winning film just two years later with Lady Vengeance, possibly the most stylistically arresting of the three films. Like its predecessors, it tackles themes of revenge and guilt and forgiveness in ways that force the audience to confront the issues, which, again, isn’t always the case in a Hollywood thriller. Hearkening back to the first installment of the trilogy, Lady Vengeance centers on the death of a child, but as audiences should expect from Park’s film, nothing is straightforward. Box office success-wise, you can put this one in between the other two films.

Park Chan-wook Post-Trilogy

     Focus Features and CJ Entertainment  

Since the launch of the trilogy in 2002, Park has gone from strength to strength as an internationally acclaimed director. 2009’s Thirst saw him working again with Song Kang-ho in a wild vampire tale that was also inspired by Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Park’s first foray into an English-language film, 2013’s Stoker, met with mixed reviews, but he was back in fighting form with psychological thriller The Handmaiden in 2015, an innovative adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. He came back to the English language with a TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl in 2018, but had another blockbuster Korean language hit with Decision to Leave in 2022, winning the coveted Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.

A Lasting Influence on Global Cinema

     Show East  

Maybe it makes more sense to say that Oldboy is the film that changed thrillers. But would Oldboy have happened without the chances Park took with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance? Without Mr. Vengeance as the pioneer, would Korean films be enjoying the wide international viewership they do today? In the early 2000s, J-horror reigned supreme, but once Park’s trilogy was out in the world, Korean horror/thriller films proved to be worthy competitors. Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho may be neck and neck with Park in terms of commercial and critical success at this point, but it’s worth noting that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was getting attention a year before Bong’s breakout hit, Memories of Murder.

It might not be a direct correlation from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance to Parasite winning not only the Cannes Palme d’Or but four major Academy Awards, or to the popularity of K-dramas sweeping every streaming network. But the still-underrated film opened up a lot of doors for South Korean cinema, awakening a global audience to a whole world of film that had gone under the radar. It was one of the first films to pave the way for South Korea as a major player on the international filmmaking scene, and you will not regret checking it out.