2 result(s) tagged “Chan-wook Park”

The unfathomably fashionable torture film has spun off a welcome girl-power subgenre, in which determined, attractive young females facilitate the agonizing dispatches of men who have committed atrocities against youth.

In Hard Candy, a teenage girl meets a lecherous and possibly pedophilic photographer online and ends up at his house, where she aims to punish him for the sins she’s certain he’s committed. In Lady Vengeance, a young woman emerges from prison with a grudge against the man responsible for her incarceration: a serial murderer of children who forced her to confess to one of his crimes by threatening to kill her daughter.

It’s a curious but promising phenomenon — invoking Virgin Spring-style outrage and justice — and if it develops into a trend, I imagine that in its mature state it will produce a gruesome but meaningful masterpiece or two. But the early entries — these two come from 2005 — are misguided.

That Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy works at all is surprising. It’s hilariously contrived, wildly improbable, and at times downright goofy in its broad comedy, most of it based in the main character’s unleashed id. The movie’s underlying self-seriousness runs so deep that it threatens to become its own form of silliness. And its pitch is constant extremity, from acute rage to blubbering desperation. Yet the effect is not tonal incongruity, but a messy mix of emotions that’s true to its protagonist.