Ha-kyun Shin and Doona Bae in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002)
Cast: Ha-kyun Shin, Hang-ko Song, Doona Bae, Ji-eun Lim, Bo-bae Han. Screenplay: Park Chan-wook, Jae-sun Lee, Jong-yong Lee, Mu-yeong Lee. Cinematography: Byeong-il Kim. Production design: Jung-hwa Choe.
In his "vengeance trilogy," Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005), Park Chan-wook has given us not only, as some have suggested, an updated version of the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies like Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, but also a vision of hell, especially if you adhere to Sartre's idea that hell is other people. Park has a way of populating his stories with nightmare figures that play no essential role in the plot, like the dudes in the next room who masturbate to the sound of Ryu's (Ha-kyun Shin) sister (Ji-eun Lim) groaning in pain (which Ryu himself, being a deaf-mute, cannot hear), or the mysterious mentally and physically afflicted man who appears as Ryu is trying to cover his sister's body with stones and persists in trying to remove them until he's driven away, meanwhile distracting Ryu from the drowning Yu-sun (Bo-bae Han). There's also the fired employee who stops Dong-jin Park's ( Hang-ko Song) car and proceeds with a failed attempt at seppuku, heightening Dong-jin's feelings of guilt, perhaps, but not providing an essential element in the narrative. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is, I think, the least successful of the three films: It doesn't succeed in transcending the revenge motif the way Oldboy does with its echoes of Dostoevsky and Kafka, and it doesn't have the technical finesse of Lady Vengeance. Its chief virtue is, especially in comparison with Lady Vengeance, the relative straightforwardness of its narrative, with the added ambiguity of its title: Is Ryu or Dong-jin "Mr. Vengeance"? In fact, the film is less about vengeance than about guilt: Ryu's sister commits suicide because she feels guilty for the kidnapping of Yu-sun, and passes along the burden of guilt to her brother when Yu-sun dies, while Dong-jin is filled with remorse over the consequences of his business failure. Park Chan-wook's characters exist in a world where there's no escape from guilt and no hope for redemption. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
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backward into first causes—stone in the pond of things,
splash splash—or we throw ourselves into the future.
we all move forward anyway. ripples in all directions.
what is a ghost?
— landscape with fruit rot and millipede, by richard silken
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???
(Apprently, they've just wrapped up the filming of Evilive.)
Source
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Isn't this obvious? You committed a crime, so you must pay for it. Inspector Han Ju Won.
BEYOND EVIL (2021)
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