Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Revenge Is Sweet
The final film in Park Chan-Wook’s vengeance trilogy Sympathy for lady vengeance tells an intimate, stylish and thought-provoking revenge story. It’s not my favourite film by him, That still goes to the handmaiden, but this film is very close and I think it’s probably one of the best revenge films I’ve ever seen.
What I love most about this film is how slow it is. This is an incredibly slow burn film but it never feels like it is. Park Chan-Wook takes his time with the narrative yet he also never allows the narrative to feel boring. Though the film takes a good while to get to its high points everything that happens prior to the film’s climax is still incredibly engaging and I really didn’t notice how slow the story actually is until I sat and thought about it after. The first hour of this film is literally just set up, not that much actually happens. Thinking about it, not that much actually happens until near the end of the film but this pay off feels so satisfying and incredibly deserved that I didn’t really mind. Because of the lengthy, intimate time we spent with our Lee Geum-ja, I cared about her and her story and I was satisfied when I finally got to see here enact the plan we had been hearing about the whole film.
Similar to Oldboy Jeong Jeong-hun handles cinematography here and it’s just drop-dead gorgeous. Like his work in The Handmaiden every frame of this film feels like a painting, it’s all perfectly composed and I can honestly just look at stills from this film for hours. Even the films most basic shots invoke such strong emotion and do a lot of work in getting us to emote with Lee Geum-ja, which is so important because we spend a very large chunk of time with her.
Like the rest in the trilogy this films main theme is vengeance and I love the way it tackles it. The other films in the trilogy do a good job at humanising characters who do some really violent stuff and they were able to make me understand them and their need for vengeance. However, what the other films didn’t do for me that Lady vengeance does so well is it was able to make me think about and question how far I’d personally go for revenge. Without spoiling I’ll say the climax of the film puts the viewer in a position where you’re witnessing something gruesome yet in a way I didn’t feel completely bad about what was happening. Yes it was horrible but I 100% understand the characters pain and anguish and after seeing it I can’t say I know what I’d do in the same situation.
It’s very easy for me to say that the climax of this film is the best scene in the film and it’s my favourite scene in the entire trilogy. It’s so brutal yet also so incredibly subtle at the same time. Rather than showing us everything that is going on, Park Chan-Wook leaves a lot to the viewer’s imagination and that really makes everything worse. Rather than seeing these horrible things, I’m left to create them in my head and like with a lot of things, what we don’t see become instantly more terrifying.
After seeing the whole trilogy I can now say this is my favourite out of the three. It tackles revenge and redemption in such as interesting way, showing us the emotional weight, anger and coldness they can cause and it shows the resounding emptiness they can leave you with once you finally give in to them. This film is a masterpiece.
