DIRECTOR PARK Chan-wook

CAST SHIN Ha-kyun, SONG Kang-ho, BAE Doo-na

RELEASE DATE March 28, 2002

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For this week’s K-Cinema Library, in honor of the recent premiere of director PARK Chan-wook’s The Little Drummer Girl BBC miniseries at the BFI London Film Festival, we take a look at his 2002 classic, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a film that helped usher both him and the burgeoning genre cinema of Korea onto the world stage.

Ryu (SHIN Ha-kyun), who is deaf and mute, works in a factory and takes care of his ailing sister who is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. Unable to wait any longer for a donor, he goes to the black market where he offers up his own kidney in exchange for one for his sister. When he wakes up from his operation without his kidney, money and anything in return, he must resort to more desperate measures. Along with his anarchist girlfriend Yeong-mi (BAE Doo-na), he hatches a plan to kidnap the daughter of Dong-jin (SONG Kang-ho), his former boss who fired him, but the scheme ends in tragedy for everyone and kicks off a series of brutal retaliations. 

Following his hit tale of cross-border camaraderie Joint Security Area /JSA (2000), PARK went down a very different road, delivering a singularly bleak, violent and electric tale of revenge, emanating from the deep chasm between the haves and have-nots of Korean society. Marrying a rich and precise stylistic edge to the social woes pervading modern society, PARK crafted a template that has come to be a signature for many of Korea’s most celebrated directors working in genre cinema.

PARK reunites with SHIN Ha-kyun and SONG Kang-ho, the actors who played the two North Korean soldiers in Joint Security Area /JSA, while BAE Doo-na rounds out the main cast. By this point, SONG was already an established name, but the detached and cruel Dong-jin was a departure for the actor which further demonstrated his range. After several supporting parts, the mute and green-haired Ryu was the role that allowed SHIN to really break through and establish himself as one of the most eccentric leading actors in Korea. Fierce and energetic, BAE was ideally cast as Yeong-mi.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance of course became the starting point for the most famous trilogy ever to come out of Korea, the thematically connected Vengeance Trilogy, as it was followed by Old Boy (2003) and Sympathy For Lady Vengeance (2005). Director PARK's latest work, the six-part adaptation of John LE CARRÉ’s The Little Drummer Girl, starring Florence PUGH, Alexander SKARSGÅRD and Michael SHANNON, is set to air on BBC and AMC starting in November.