Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Asian Cinema
•
1h 56m
Directed by Park Chan Wook | 116 mins | 2002
Fired from his factory job, the deaf, gentle Ryu finds work in the underworld—and begins on a path that will end in an explosion of visceral violence. A brutal, claustrophobic film of escalating desperation, illustrating with grim logic how an ordinary man can be pushed into acts of extraordinary retaliation.
Selected by Molly Young.
Up Next in Asian Cinema
-
The Hole
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments... -
Agent of Happiness
Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is h... -
A Girl Missing
Directed by Kōji Fukada | 111 mins | 2019
As the carer for the elderly Toko, home nurse Ichiko is practically a member of the family, favored especially by the bedridden woman’s granddaughters. But Ichiko’s life—and identity—come unspooled after the abduction of Saki, the younger of the two girls...
