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Noted film critic Richard Corliss has compiled a list of the top 12 female revenge films for Time Magazine, which features a pair of popular Korean thrillers. The selected films were PARK Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) and IM Sang-soo’s The Housemaid (2010).

 

Lady Vengeance is the third and final film of director PARK famous ‘Vengeance Trilogy’, which also features Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003). Meanwhile, The Housemaid is a remake of KIM Ki-young’s 1960 original of the same name which is often cited as one of the best Korean films of all time. The remake competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. According to Corliss: “Beyond its reductive social view, the grim, gleaming Housemaid has a silky thread of tension tightening around the viewer’s rooting interest, right up to the cutting revenge Eun-yi takes on her torturers.”

 

The rankings are testament to Korea’s reputation as a purveyor of popular and innovative revenge fare. Corliss explains that “Korean melodramas are like classic Hollywood fare gone totally nuts. The crimes are more vividly displayed, the retribution way more lurid.”