Chan-wook Parks‘s Lady Vengeance is the third and last installment of the “Vengeance Trilogy”, which are all linked by theme only not literal sequels. Nearly the entire first half of the film is spent trying to understand the main character and the sequence of events that led her do the things she may or may not have done. So be warned that even revealing most of the synopsis is pretty much a spoiler.

Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee) is released from her thirteen and a half year prison sentence for kidnapping and murdering the boy Park Won-mo. She is presented with a plate of tofu upon her release; it is a tradition that symbolizes that she will never sin again. Instead of accepting this she smacks it out of the givers hand. An obvious hint that she will sin again and she wants redemption.

It is revealed later that Geum-ja Lee did not murder Park Won-mo after all, although she did help kidnap the boy, she did not commit the murder. We find this out when she incorrectly gives the color of the boy’s marble he played with. So why would someone lie about being a murderer and get thirteen years in prison for something they did not do? Eventually, we find out that she was blackmailed.

Geum-ja Lee had a baby named Jenny (Yea-young Kwon) when she was seventeen years old. She needed a place to stay so she called her English teacher at the time, Mr. Baek (Min-sik Choi). The film alludes that Mr. Baek blackmailed her with Jenny into confessing she was the sole person responsible for the kidnapping and murder. She does not see her daughter again until after her prison sentence.

Everyone that runs into Geum-ja Lee now tells her that they hardly recognize her because she has changed so much. Once a “kind hearted” girl is now a cold woman looking for vengeance. She openly admits that she plans to kill the man who put her in prison and the true murderer of Park Won-mo.

While she was in prison, she had a job of taking care of another inmate who needed to be fed. This inmate was a larger woman who often bullied other inmates into sexual favors and was generally unpleasant to be around. Over the course of three years of feeding her, we find out that Geum-ja Lee was putting bleach in with her food and one day her stomach could not handle it anymore and she died.

All the other inmates were happy she killed the bully and owed her a favor in return when they all get released. Geum-ja Lee redeems that favor as part of a plan to “kidnap” the kidnapper, Mr. Baek. While she is executing her plan to capture him and seek redemption, he is at the same time trying to capture her. So that is where I’ll stop the synopsis and make you watch the film to see how it unfolds. Although, I admit, half the fun of the film watching and figuring out what I have mentioned rather than how it ends.

In typical Chan-wook Park’s style, the scenes jump around a lot instead of following a linear narrative which makes some scenes seem unimportant at the time but later reveals the importance. That being said, this style of editing demands upmost attention to detail which some will not be bothered with. Like the other two films of the trilogy, re-watching Lady Vengeance would be necessary to full appreciate the film.

There are different versions of the film but I watched the one that the color of the scenes slowly fades to black and white by the end of the film. I found it to compliment the overall gloomy emotion that the characters felt with their vengeance very well. I highly recommend you watch this version of the film if you are given the choice. The visual style Chan-wook has is some of the best in cinema.

When comparing Lady Vengeance to the rest of the series I would say it is the weakest of them all. Oldboy completely blew my mind not just for the excellent story or great cinematography but how poetic and symbolic it was throughout. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance had a better overall plot. I found myself empathizing with the main character a lot less in this film than the other two.

That being said, when thinking of Lady Vengeance on it’s own and comparing it just to other people’s work, it would be a stand out. Chan-wook Park is a magnificent director whose films are beautifully-shot, masterfully told and Lady Vengeance is no exception. This one just lacked the big twists and overall character development of some of his other work.

Oldboy is a powerful Korean film that is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing. It is one that would not be able to be distributed in America because of the nature of it’s sexuality and violence. It is about a man who seeks revenge after being captured and imprisoned for 15 years without knowing why. When released he is given 5 days to figure out why. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, I think after 15 years his dish was still frozen. The plot may seem simple but it is told in a sophisticated, and at times extreme, manner.

A middle-aged man named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is in police custody and is highly intoxicated at the police station. While belligerently shouting at the police, we learn that it is his daughter’s birthday and that he had gotten her a pair of angel wings as a gift. A friend comes to bail him out and as they stop to make a call from a photo booth, Oh Dae-su mysteriously disappears.

When he regains consciousness he finds himself in a hotel looking room with a desk, a bed and a TV. Although it looks like a hotel room it is more like a prison cell. He receives his food on a tray through a slot in the door and pleads with the man to tell him why they are imprisoning him. No reply. This is where he will spend the next 15 years of his life.

The TV becomes his only companion and learns from the news that his wife was murdered and his daughter has been adopted. To make manners worse, the police are after him as their lead suspect in the case. At least he now knows that the police are in no way associated with his current situation. So he starts making a list of all the people he is wronged in the past to try and come up with who might be behind this.

Keeping a man in solitary confinement for that long has drastic consequences on one’s mind. Partly out of frustration but mostly to keep an edge for revenge, he keeps up with martial arts like training in his room. He punches the solid wall until his hand can no longer take it.

After 15 years of chiseling away at the concrete wall with a chop stick, he finally breaks through a brick in a wall to the outside world. He figures it will be exactly a month before he is finally able to escape. Many exciting thoughts rush through his head such as; what will he eat when he gets out, how will he get his money, with all the car sounds he must be in a city but which one? But the most important question he asks himself is what floor is he on, it could very well be the 52nd floor. He decides he does not care, even if he falls to his death he will still be getting out.

Turns out he would not have to wait a month to escape because they release him before he could do so. Still he is given no answers as to why he was imprisoned or who was behind it. He goes to a sushi restaurant where he befriends a female chef he recognizes from his TV. Her name is Mido (Kang Hye-jeong) and she answers his request for something to eat that is alive. As he eats the live octopus, which by the way is not for the squeamish, and you cannot help but wonder if he is eating it just to feel what it is like to be alive again after being “dead” for nearly 15 years.

Mido and Oh Dae-su’s friendship spawns into a relationship and eventually love. She is willing to help with his cause and track down the person responsible for his imprisonment. After doing a bunch of legwork they find out that the person he is looking for is Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae). Oh Dae-su receives a threat from Lee Woo-jin that if he does not figure out in 5 days why he was imprisoned, every woman he loved will be killed. If he does, Lee Woo-jin will kill himself.

As with most films that have a mystery element, this film has quite an amazing twist that presents itself towards the end of the film. Sharing the details would of course ruin the entire film, which is why I will not divulge the spoilers in my review. The twist is what helps make this film so amazing to watch.

There were so many wonderful scenes throughout Oldboy, which range from suspense filled, violence driven and emotional. There is a scene where he hallucinates ants are crawling out of his arm which makes you wonder if the whole thing is all just in his head. At one point he fights a while room filled with guys with his fists and a hammer and is easily one of the better fight sequences to watch.

A couple of scenes are disturbing to sit through. One of those scenes is when Oh Dae-su eats a living octopus. Four actual live octopods were eaten for the scene, which gained a lot of controversy when the film was released, despite the fact eating live octopus in Korea is common. The other hard to watch scene is where we see very realistic teeth-pulling using the back of a hammer.

Director Park Chan-wook is very poetic throughout his film. The main character often refers to the world as the bigger prison. At the beginning we are presented with the quote, “Be it a grain of sand or a rock, in water they sink the same”, which reflects that Oh Dae-su does not know whether he did something small or big to Lee Woo-jin in order to get imprisoned. One that is repeated several times in the film is, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you will weep alone.” A quote that is true about finding answers, “You can’t find the right answer if you ask the wrong questions.”

Every once in a while there is a film you come across that blows your mind, Oldboy is one of them for me. It is not hard to praise it for it’s technical achievements, the intelligent script, the acting and the amazing plot twists. The film never feels too long as the story always seems to be advancing even towards the end. There is a reason why it won Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes Film Festival in 2004, it is filmmaking at it’s finest.