Disturbing, traumatic, irredeemable...These words come to mind when one watches Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, first in Chan Wook Park’s Vengeance Trilogy. Unlike Joint Security Area, Korean director Chan Wook Park veers from mainstream convention in this film, creating arthouse horror that preys on audience’s minds long after. This gut-wrenching quality makes this the hardest film in the Vengeance Trilogy to watch or re-watch. Since graphic violence appears rarely, which elements exactly, push this film into gruesome ground?
Cinematic Style - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Chan Wook Park reveals his love for details in the DVD commentary. Details, mingling with deep horror, produce the overpowering violence in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Ha Kyun Shin is Ryu, the brother who sells his kidney illegally, in exchange for a donor for his sister. The deal goes awry, resulting in Ryu and his girlfriend kidnapping Park’s (Kang Ho Song) daughter for extra money. Chan Wook Park weaves a story akin to Greek tragedy, like in Oldboy, with crime of the most unforgivable sort. Details enhance realism and increase the trauma in this film. One disturbing scene occurs when Park enjoys a meal after electrocuting Cha (Du Na Bae). Her stream of urine touches his plate of food. This is visually explosive as Park has become horrifically indifferent to suffering. Yet Park, like Ryu, believes himself to be a good person.
Trauma in Sympathy
Ryu the deaf and dumb protagonist, may be Chan Wook Park’s most violent character on film. Yet he is simple-minded, and fails to understand a joke earlier in the film, about a man with two heads. By removing Ryu’s hearing and voice, Chan appears to create a ‘monster’ who cannot hear a drowning girl’s screams or his sister’s agony. When Ryu discovers his sister is dead, he cannot vocalise his pain. Ryu’s inability to connect to people this way makes his situation more suffocating. Park on the other hand, can scream and hear, but deliberately numbs these senses in his quest for vengeance, becoming a scarier ‘monster’ than Ryu.
Nature in Sympathy
A strong aspect of violence in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the indifference of nature to people’s sufferings. Chan Wook Park himself comments on this. Despite Yu Sun (Bo Bae Han) drowning, or Park’s grieving for his loss, nature remains calm, unperturbed. The sounds of the lake, of dripping water, of cicadas in the grass, transform cinema verite into an accomplice of the crime. Slowly the characters become as indifferent as nature, like the four men who mistake Ryu’s sister’s pain for pleasure and get off on it. Any existing sympathy from the audience grows smaller and smaller, like the distant European shots and decreasing frames of Park and Ryu.
Who is Mr. Vengeance?
From The Destroyed Man, to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the film’s changed title adopts an aggressive tone, but leaves audiences puzzling over who is Mr. Vengeance. A clue perhaps lies in Ryu showing sympathy for Park, who in turn butchers him. So much exposition is left out that audiences can be easily confused. Ryu’s girlfriend looks like his sister, hinting of incest; his sign language is not always interpreted, and too many Korean notes are not subtitled.
Political Statement in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Brooding in the background is the strong undercurrent of financial ruin and loss of control. The organ stealers, the family that commits suicide and the eventual ruin of a rich businessman like Park alert the audience of a society gone wrong. What delicate feelings that exist between humans are soon washed away by cruel survival, unhelped by nature.
- Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot: South Korea)
- Director: Chan Wook Park
- Writers: Jae Sun Lee, Mu Yeong Lee, Yong Jong Lee, Chan Wook Park
- Actors: Ha Kyun Shin, Kang Ho Song, Du Na Bae, Ji Eun Lim, Bo Bae Han
- Running time: 129 minutes
Lynette S.K. Webster - Copywriter turned Freelance Writer Copywriter for 4 years in Singapore, writing radio, print, TV and recruitment ads for national radio ...
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