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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 2/14/2026

Park Chan-wook

In America, Park Chan-wook will probably never be known for anything other than Oldboy. He had made four films previously in Korea (the first two he wishes he’d never made, but they do exist, think of how much Kubrick tried to suppress and even destroy Fear and Desire), but it was his third, Joint Security Area that established his career as a filmmaker in Korea. It was hugely successful and essentially gave him a blank check to do whatever he wanted.

What he did was called the Vengeance Trilogy, three disconnected films all dealing with central characters and their efforts at vengeance. Oldboy is the second of the three (surrounded by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance), and it came about in the early 2000s, right at the time websites like Ain’t It Cool News were still somewhat relevant. The burgeoning American cinema fans (mostly male and obsessed with genre) latched onto it and gave it oxygen, helped even more by the fact that Quentin Tarantino was a big fan who helped award it the Grand Prix award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival where he was jury president.

It’s a violent, Greek-inspired tale of bloody vengeance from a man who was mysteriously placed in a secret, private prison for 15 years and then given a few days to figure out why, and it captured the imaginations of the film fan community at the time.

And...Park has kind of fallen off the American cineaste map since. There was a blip with The Handmaiden, but movies like Decision to Leave, his television work like The Little Drummer Girl or The Sympathizer get mostly ignored, drowned out in favor of more maintstream American movies. And that’s going to create a deeply warped view of who Park Chan-wook is as a filmmaker.

Content

Before getting to how he tells his stories, what are they? Well, they're mostly intersections of romance (often in a style that could be called baroque) mixed with violence. Both need to be there. They don't exist in isolation. They are interrelated.

From the sexual relationship between the kidnappers in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance that goes wrong (violently) to the more mature spousal romance between Man-su and his wife in No Other Choice, which the character must preserve through violence, these films see romance usually enhanced through the application of violence.

How that operates is usually the violence is necessary to keep the relationships going. The killing of those between Oh Sae-du and his goal in Oldboy which is also how he connects with Mi-do. The investigation of Seo-rae's husband's death which brings her together with the policeman Hae-jun in Decision to Leave. The killing of a bully in Stoker that brings India and her uncle Charlie together (this is less overtly romantic). And then there's there are the two peaks of the idea, Thirst, the story of the Catholic Priest Sang-hyun who becomes a vampire because of a blood transfusion and finds materialistic pleasures with Tae-ju, wife of a friend, and then the main characters in The Handmaiden, the Japanese lady Izumi and the Korean handmaiden Sook-hee who have to overcome Izumi's overbearing uncle (by marriage) who desires her and the fraudulent Count Fujiwara to end up together.

In all of these stories, they must commit violence, and the committing of violence is what strengthens the relationships. And they don't have to be necessarily romantic in nature. I did lump Stoker in with that group because it exists on a borderline (it's just completely unconsummated), but Joint Security Area is all about platonic friendship between men and the violence that both deepens their bonds and actually ends up driving them apart at the same time. It's the violence that enhances things, and it's key to the point of all of his films.

There are other variations, though, like with Lady Vengeance where the necessity of violence actually drives the titular character away from her daughter (the Vengeance Trilogy's contemplation on the different aspects of vengeance is actually quite interesting as a package).

It's the violence that brings together, that keeps together, and that even enhances the romance, and the violence is often justified. The Vengeance Trilogy is named thusly because most of the violence is vengeance, in response to previous wrongdoing. However, this can be where the dark comedy pops in, but that's more of a stylistic question. So…

Style


I started this run having seen most of his works already. I hadn't seen the first two he's disowned (The Moon is-The Sun's Dream and Trio), the romantic comedy I'm a Cyborg but That's Okay, or his most recent, No Other Choice. So, upon watching everything in order, I already knew the ebbs and flows of Park's filmmaking style. What struck me quite soon after starting up Oldboy once more was that it's remarkably different in feel from the rest of his body of work.

There's an activity to Oldboy, to how Park presents action in the frame, and an element of stuffing the narrative to the brim with activity that his other films don't have. The rest (save, perhaps, I'm a Cyborg) are far more spare, telling simpler stories in more measured tones (more measured, not completely measured). Even immediately around Oldboy, the two other Vengeance movies, things just feel quieter, less like Park is barely controlling chaos and more like he's precisely moving pieces around a chessboard.

I contrast that to what is probably his most diametrically opposite film, Decision to Leave, an incredibly restrained tale of passion and murder that sees almost no direct violence, and even then when it does show its few moments (or the results of off-screen violence), Park keeps the camera very steady and, within motion, smooth.

When thinking about the rest of his work, it trends much more towards the filmmaking style of Decision to Leave rather than Oldboy. The smooth crane moves of Thirst, the implied violence of The Handmaiden, and the restrained denouement of No Other Choice just fit the model of filmmaking that Decision to Leave represents better than Oldboy.

The Point


Do you know how people compare every Martin Scorsese movie to Goodfellas? How people say that Scorsese just keeps trying to replicate his early 90s gangster movie? Even though the movies in that vein represent less than a fourth of his entire body of work? If you expect every Martin Scorsese movie to be Goodfellas, will you accept, as a viewer, something so radically different like The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Silence, or The Irishman? Most people seem to have really hard times accepting Scorsese working in spheres that aren't exclusively like Goodfellas.

And I fear that's happening with Park. Oldboy will probably always be his best known movie (it's not his most successful at the box office, that would be No Other Choice, but the numbers are small and insignificant overall in the US), but if you hear about the extreme violence, the ending's extremes, or the stuffed nature of the film and recoil from it, are you willing to check out any of the others? If all of that appeals to you, but you find out that Thirst is significantly quieter and less outwardly violent, will that push you away?

Proper representation of an artist is important, I think. That's not always their best known work. Fritz Lang is another example where the most famous movie he made (Metropolis) is weirdly unrepresentative of his whole body of work (go with The Testament of Doctor Mabuse or Die Nibelungen: Kriemheld's Revenge or even Western Union for better examples). The right representative example not only exemplifies any intentional thematic concerns but also the style in which they tell stories, and sometimes just the kinds of stories themselves.

All of Park's movies are combinations of romance and violence. How restrained is a variable. On the one end would be Decision to Leave, very restrained, and on the other would be The Handmaiden, which is very explicit (at least in regard to the sex). How frank with the romance (one can say relationships if applied to Joint Security Area which has no romance) and the violence creates this tapestry where none of Park's films feel like repetitions, but they are all still obviously made by the same accomplished filmmaker. A proper foundation from which to start understanding him could help new audiences find their way through a filmmaker who may interest them, if they're not guided astray on accident.

That's not to say that Park is for everyone. The foreign nature of his storytelling (not to mention the actual foreign language) represents a barrier for many people even before getting to the subject matter. However, I just feel like his most famous film could end up either a barrier itself or offer up a false expectation of what else is to come from him. It's less an academic exercise about properly cataloging things and more about setting a stage properly.
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Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Wuthering Heights

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Joint Security Area (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Assured, accomplished, clear-eyed in unwinding a mystery through point of view, and sometimes quite beautiful to simply look at (there's a great scene in the snow as two squads face each other), all while being surprisingly touching, Joint Security Area is the announcement that Park has really arrived this time after a couple of false starts." [Personal Collection]

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It has a surprising emotional element to it as motives fray in the face of unforeseen events, and the ironic ending fits surprisingly well, offering a payoff to what felt like a random line from earlier." [YouTube]

Oldboy (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is peak Park Chan-wook. It's a noticeable step up from everything he's made so far, the marriage of material and Park's filmmaking style. That combination of baroque romance, Greek tragedy, and blackly comic situational awareness that creates this tragic but endlessly entertaining package." [Personal Collection]

Lady Vengeance (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It does feel like something of a step back, a decision late made by a less assured filmmaker than the one who made his last movie, but overall, Park ends the Vengeance Trilogy on a high note." [Kanopy]

Thirst (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "A film with a moral question at its centered, manifested by a character, who has to go through darkly comic events in a genre setting with excellently composed shots from beginning to end? Yes, this is why I love Park Chan-wook so much." [Personal Collection]

Stoker (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "And the movie mostly exists on vibes. They're kind of terrifying, horrifying vibes that Park manages with cool formalism to ease the audience into, but this is the story of the creation of a monster in the end." [Personal Collection]

The Handmaiden (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "This is a notch or so below it because of the self-indulgence, I think, but it's still a demonstration that Park really knows how to craft a character-based story for film with great looking visuals all with that extra oomph of edging into the extreme." [Amazon Prime]

Decision to Leave (Rating 4/4) Full Review "However, the investment over time ends up worthwhile to find what, I think, is Park's most deeply felt and most wonderfully made film. Is this his masterpiece? Well, hopefully he'll work for decades more and make even more great films, but for now-I think this may be it." [Personal Collection]

No Other Choice (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I suspect that this film is going to grow on me with time." [Theater]

Contact

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