Lady Vengeance (2005)

Review by Sean Patterson



"Be White. Live White."

Lady Vengeance is the third movie in Chan-wook Park's vengeance trilogy. It follows the cult favorite Oldboy, but is an altogether different movie.
Geum-ja Lee is sent to prison for 13 years for the murder of a young boy. It soon becomes clear that she is innocent, so why did she confess to such an abhorrent crime? We find out her motivations when she is released from prison, but I won't be a spoiler. She then uses the contacts she made on the inside to obtain the revenge she had been planning all those years she was locked up.
As always, revenge is not so clear-cut. Where Oldboy studied the possible scale of revenge, Lady Vengeance asks how vengeance should be parsed out when there are multiple revenge seekers. There is only so much to go around.
I'm really doing a disservice to Lady Vengeance, though, to compare it to Oldboy. It is it's own movie. Park unsubtly uses the music and camera work to invoke French nouveau cinema. The pretty girl I watched the movie with was reminded of Amalee, while I was struck with thoughts of Punch Drunk Love.
Now that I've written that, it really hits me how similar the director of Punch Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Chan-wook Park are as directors. The are both very conscious of camera movement. Both routinely include elements of the surreal (of which Lady Vengeance has plenty) in their movies. Both take their time telling a story (very long running times).
Lady Vengeance didn't strike me viscerally the way Park's other movies have, but I don't think it was supposed to. Although its subtlety seems prudish next to Oldboy's relentless pacing, Lady Vengeance is a beautiful, thoughtful meditation on waylaid revenge.
Oh, and don't worry gore hounds: despite its pretensions, there's still a bucket of blood. It is, after all, and unmistakably, a Chan-wook Park movie.