A little over two years ago, we wrote this 10-film primer on the Korean New Wave. But even in the short time since then, it feels like that movement has grown exponentially stronger and more diverse, to the point that we’d happily assert that the most consistently exciting things happening in genre cinema right now are coming out of South Korea. Often that’s due to a willingness to hybridize genres to deliver something that feels fresh, as with Bong Joon-ho‘s social parable sci-fi “Snowpiercer” or Kim Jee-woon‘s noir-inflected spy caper “The Age of Shadows,” but more crucially it’s that Korea has turned out a generation of directors whose level of filmmaking craft is second to none, and who are not above putting all that artistry in service of the most shamelessly entertaining storytelling. Enter “The Handmaiden,” a Gothic period melodrama thriller, which is released this week and marks the latest title from the Korean New Wave’s best-known name (internationally, anyway): Park Chan-wook.
READ MORE: Park Chan-wook’s ‘The Handmaiden’ Is Deliriously Fun & Terminally Silly [Review]
Park’s filmmaking career is, appropriately for someone so preternaturally fond of a twisty story, not a straight line. Originally a philosophy student, the story goes it was a viewing of Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Vertigo” that made him decide to be a filmmaker. After various stints as an Assistant Director, in 1992 he got what should have been his break and made his first feature, the lyrically titled drama “The Moon Is… The Sun’s Dream.” But the film flopped, as did 1997 follow up “Trio” — and if you want evidence of just how bleak things seemed on the filmmaking front at that point for Park, he spent several years thereafter making ends meet playing piano in a brothel as a film critic. But everything changed with 2000’s “Joint Security Area” which enjoyed record-breaking success in Korea, and even carried him through another box office disappointment (“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is a terrific film but was only really embraced retroactively) until the game-changer that was “Oldboy” kicked not just his career, but Korean cinema in general, up to a new level of international renown.
Korean cinema is so vibrant right now that it feels like sometimes we almost take Park, who was the primary access point for so many of us, for granted. As a corrective to that, in celebration of the wonderful ‘Handmaiden’ (here’s our review from Cannes) and just because writing about his films is such a pleasure, here’s our ranking of the films of Park Chan-wook.
8. “I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK” (2006)
The genius of Park Chan-Wook, and of many directors in this Korean New Wave, is the way that they juggle disparate tones, slapstick comedy sometimes going hand-in-hand with Greek tragedy and extreme violence. But it’s a difficult balancing act, and unfortunately “I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK,” really the only one of Park’s major features we don’t at least partly like, sees him plummet off the tonal tightrope and crash onto the floor below. Never properly theatrically released in the U.K., the film was in theory intended to be lighter than the ‘Vengeance Trilogy‘ that preceded it, with Park wanting to make something that his daughter could “legally” see. And so it’s a sort of romantic comedy, albeit one set in a mental institution, where Young-goon (Im Soo-jung), a woman who believes she’s a cyborg, and schizophrenic kleptomaniac Il-soon (pop star Rain) fall for each other. As ever, it looks beautiful, with a lovely pastel palette, and some inventively shot sequences — it’s not like Park and regular DOP Chung Chung-hoon are phoning it in. But the film’s twee comedy mixed with the occasional burst of melodrama, sci-fi or violence (there’s a brilliantly executed, but woefully misjudged fantasy massacre sequence at one point) never finds an even keel. Worse, it mostly feels like Park treats mental illness as a series of adorable quirks and an excuse for flights of fantasy rather than a reality. Hardcore Park fans will get something out of it, but everyone else may just find it enervating.
7. “Thirst” (2009)
Though there were horror-movie aspects to the ‘Vengeance’ films, Park fully embraced the genre (and a whole lot more besides) with his take on the vampire genre, “Thirst.” In some ways the director’s bleakest work, it’s a (very, very, very) loose adaptation of Emile Zola’s “Therese Raquin,” which sees Catholic priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) turned into a vampire and forced to drink blood to stave off a deadly virus, then falling for Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), the wife of his childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). Infused with both a burning eroticism and a deep sense of moral uncertainty and guilt, it’s a fascinating film, one that barely needed to be a vampire film from a narrative point of view but nevertheless benefits from including the archetype, somehow finding a fresh metaphorical take. Many of the characteristics of the director’s work are here — some staggering camera trickery, a dark humor — and it’s probably one of his most fascinating and richest films. But again, he dances between tones a little less successfully than with other pictures, and the pacing is indulgent to the point of leaden, sometimes making the film feel like a trudge rather than a thrill. It’s appropriate for the mood of the piece, but it’s also much less watchable than some of his other work. Nevertheless, marginally-off-his-game Park is still better than 95% of what other filmmakers can do, and there’s much to cherish here, particularly a lovely performance from Song.
6. “Stoker” (2013)
Park’s first (and so far, only) English-language movie is maybe the most divisive film of his career — even on usually harmoniously aligned Team Playlist, there are people who really hate it, people who love it, and some who are more mixed on it. But even the ‘love’ camp, who have temporarily locked everyone else out of the CMS to write this section, would concede that it’s not quite up there with the director’s very, very best work. Penned by, of all people, “Prison Break” star Wentworth Miller, it’s a slice of American Gothic that nods to Hitchcock’s “Shadow Of A Doubt,” and sees the life of young India (Mia Wasikowska) overturned when her father (Dermot Mulroney) dies mysteriously. Turning up for the funeral is long-lost Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who develops a bond with India and her mother (Nicole Kidman) that unleashes something darker in both. It’s in some ways quite distinct from Park’s Korean work, more a work of sustained atmosphere and tone than the densely plotted stories fans might have been used to, and there’s an edge of campiness that you wouldn’t find in, say, “Oldboy.” And yet it still feels utterly Park-ish: the bursts of shocking violence, the pitch-black humor, the absolute control of sound and vision. Yes, the plotting can seem silly if you don’t buy into it completely, but to approach it purely as a Hitchcockian thriller is to misread it: it’s as much a sort of perverted coming-of-age picture, a heady current of blossoming sexuality driven by the terrific performances from Wasikowska, Kidman (who recently has only rarely been deployed as well as she is here) and the revelatory Goode.
5. “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002)
The first film in what would later be dubbed the ‘Vengeance Trilogy’ “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” sees Park coming into his own, though thematically rather than visually, as he had yet to hit on his key partnership with DP Chung Chung-hoon, and here works in a more muted register with DP Kim Byeong-Il. But if the shooting style is relatively straightforward (though still extremely considered), the story is anything but — it’s a murky, violent tale that twists and turns and builds to a shattering expression of the corrosive futility of revenge. Deaf-mute Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) has his meagre savings and his kidney stolen after undergoing a black-market operation in an effort to save his dying sister, and, desperate for money, he and his anarchist girlfriend (Bae Doona) hit on a kidnapping scheme. But the little girl they take drowns accidentally, prompting her enraged father Park Dong-jin (Park regular Song Kang-ho) to go on a retributive rampage. ‘Sympathy’ is remarkable in eliciting just that — not only for the grieving father but for the fundamentally decent Ryu, and even for supporting characters whose better natures seem trapped in one of the more deterministic of Shakespeare’s grand tragedies. It’s a fascinating, extremely violent introduction to the kind of feverish nihilism that characterizes Park’s conception of vengeance, and as the gory yet moving climax proves (is there any director more adept at wringing surprising emotionality from the slashing of an Achilles tendon?), revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it’s fatal to those cooking it up too.