User reviews

After thirteen and half years in prison for kidnapping and murdering the boy Park Won-mo, Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee) is released and tries to fix her life. She finds a job in a bakery; she orders the manufacturing of a special weapon; she reunites with her daughter, who was adopted by an Australian family; and she plots revenge against the real killer of Won-mo, the English teacher Mr. Baek (Min-sik Choi). With the support of former inmates from prison, Geum-ja seeks an unattained redemption with her vengeance.

"Lady Vengeance" is a very dark tale of vengeance and search for redemption. The screenplay is confused in some moments, using symbols and metaphors, but the story is engaging blending black humor and unpleasant and bold scenes of torture and death of children with a harsh revenge. Yeong-ae Lee has a magnificently performance in the role of Geum-ja along almost fourteen years of her life. I am a big fan of Chan-wook Park, and I regret that in Brazil the first movie of his trilogy about vengeance ("Boksuneun Naui Geot" a.k.a. "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance") has not been released yet. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Lady Vingança" ("Lady Vengeance")

"Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" is a surprisingly poetic finale to Park's excellent Revenge Trilogy. The film fuses the relatively low-key style of "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" with the jet-black humor of "Oldboy," while adding welcome moments of poignancy and sentiment. The film is nowhere near as violent as its predecessors, although a good deal of mayhem takes place offscreen.

Yeong-ae Lee is outstanding as the troubled protagonist Geum-ja, the ex-convict who is seeking redemption as much as revenge. Although the supporting actors -- including several from Park's earlier films -- are uniformly fine, Lee's performance is the heart of the film.

"Lady Vengeance" is difficult to describe without revealing major plot points, as the most memorable scenes come at revelatory moments in the story. Suffice it to say that the climax blends tragedy and hilarity with a degree of success that few directors could hope to match.

9/10. Bravo.

Chan-Wook Park was already the Master of Dysfunction after Old Boy, now he can add the title of King of Pain (thanks Sting) to his CV.

The depth of feeling in the second half of this film is staggering, and comes in stark contrast to the startling apathy of the first half. The masterful cinematography is something we have come to expect but the director's ability to compose the most evocative of tableaux never ceases to amaze- the final shot of the movie being a case in point.

As the above reviewer says, one must be cryptic in commenting on this film but it must be said that its final act really transforms it from a beautifully crafted work into a masterpiece.

This is a film which shocks without ever descending into gratuity, while frequently forcing a guilty laugh with its darker-than-black's-shadow humour.

I guess it was somewhat convenient and clever for Park to have conceived this film as the third and final installment to his two pragmatically different films. Seeing as how Lady Vengeance shares two similar themes of unjust imprisonment and child kidnapping with her elder brothers Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Clearly if this picture wouldn't have been regarded in the trilogy, many would proclaim Park as stagnant and unable of moving away from these akin proses dealing with revenge.

Film opens with the release of Lady Vengeance, a.k.a. "The Witch", a.k.a. "kind-hearted Geum-ja", played by the elegant Yeong-ae Lee. I was quite surprised by how heavily narrated this film was from the get-go, as I was expecting the major breakdowns and motives revealed at a much later time, lets say right before the final pinnacle. But I preferred this to how Oldboy played, in a sense that Lady Vengeance didn't largely depended on the "big shocker" to end the film and instead moved along steadily, revealing everything piece by piece.

Making comparisons with Park's past two films was much tangible here as with each beautiful classical piece mirroring one from Oldboy there was also the unexaggerated violence similar to that of SFMV. The music was again well chosen and played in melancholic and elating waves without any use of mainstream ballads or electronic beats. Some of the compositions were used multiple times and while they might come off a bit repetitive, most of them were either recurring for the sake of certain notions and themes that the characters were going through or just because.

Aside from the tight main cast, many known and capable faces of Korean cinema made appearances in short and shorter interludes throughout the film. Not much else could be said, apart from them doing just as much as the script was asking of them. While the visual and musical aspects of the film are simply splendid, the story here might cause some viewers to contend whether everything premeditated and executed by our leading lady was truly worthful.

**The following comments contain spoilers**

A lot was shown of what Geum-ja was like during the prison time where she was boldly portrayed as a calculating, 'devil in God's clothes' of a woman who had a conveniently good eye for helping those who could later help her. Geum-ja was able to put on a quite a good by finding faith and making public speeches. But she had the best part reserved for Mr. Baek, played by the powerhouse actor Min-sik Choi. Mr. Baek had betrayed Geum-ja and made her take the blame for a murder of a child that he himself committed. And if then 19 year old Geum-ja was to refuse, he would've simply killed her (illegitimate) newborn child.

More was revealed about Mr. Baek who continued working as a kindergarten teacher for when Geum-ja captured him with the help of her former cell mate, who returned her a favor by marrying Mr. Baek and coping with his demeaning ways. Apparently Mr. Baek's past crime with that child wasn't a singular case as he had a fetish for capturing little kids and taping their deaths on camera for his viewing pleasure.

After toying with Mr. Baek, but holding back from completely destroying him, Geum-ja revealed her grand plan. Standing in the middle of an abandoned school, in a classroom of irregularly filled seats, Geum-ja gathered the family members of those kids that Mr. Baek had killed. After screening the tapes, Geum-ja gave those people options to either have their way with Baek or call upon the law to deal with him instead.

Watching these characters nauseate over the tapes of their little children being tortured in a way deflated Geum-ja's arc as a character and somewhat weakened the film's final punch in my eyes. So many years spent in jail and questions surrounding the well-being of her daughter must have been undoubtedly excruciating for her, but standing next to these people, who unlike her seemed so much more humane and relatable, I felt a lot more sorrow for them than I did for Geum-ja, most likely due to how mechanical and manipulative her character was made to look, which to say the least was brave of the director, if not a bit overzealous. Her struggles with gaining forgiveness from the dead boy and the symbolism of the white cake representing her state of repentance, overshadowed the climax of the revenge, however the scenes with the family members going in one by one after Mr. Baek were the essence of the film.

**End of spoilers**

In the end I found Lady Vengeance more infatuated with itself than Oldboy, but not as fundamentally visceral and unrelenting as SFMV, which remains to be my favorite film from Park to date. Lady Vengeance felt like an amusement park, filled with hard facts mixed with dreamy imagination sequences, en route of sardonic pokes at religion and sexual deeds. A film with a little bit of everything for everyone, that's if you don't strip away its flashy overtones and comic-book-like personifications, which gracefully coat the film's otherwise improbable scheme, fantasized by a random cell-woman, unjustly imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit.

I think Park needs to make a film that will not only disassociate him from his well talked about and highly debated trilogy flicks, but will devoid him from being thrown into the pool of devaluing comparisons to Hollywood films like Kill Bill as also witnessed with the response to A Bittersweet Life from the press and movie fans. Park has all the right tools and he has shown us the many faces of revenge, now it's time for him to show us something else.

Just got the Korean 2 DVD set and watched the B/W version first. All I can say is that, this film is a masterpiece! I was very moved and if you do one more thing in your life before you die, see this film!

Of course, I use the term "masterpiece" in its true sense, as the work which reveals an artist's achievement of "mastery" over his or her craft. Don't be confused with the latter conotation that a masterpiece is a "perfect" work. Could there ever be such a thing? Truly, this film shows the original sense of the word, such that I would be nervous seeing any subsequent films from him.

There are two versions of the film. I checked the colour version, and besides the opening credits being slightly different, and the much talked about retaining of colour throughout, it appears to be exactly the same.

I am sure your are all familiar with the premise, but I think that the less you know, the better. At it's basic level, this film follows in the classic "quest for revenge" schema. A beautiful woman is condemned to 13 and a half years of incarceration for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. By this theme, the film connects to the previous entries in the now Vengeance "Trilogy", but it is in no way a rerun.

Just like the other two films, (Sympathy for) Lady Vengeance is gorgeous. The design in the film is extraordinary, and there are so many frames that are simply beautiful. The use of colour and light is inspirational in some parts, and I really can't think of watching any version but the "fading" one. Maybe it's because I saw that version first, but I didn't find the colour version as deeply affecting.

I think that which is better will be a personal decision for all who see this film. There are a some points where the fading version is very effective with what becomes subdued spots of colour. Yet, the characters in the film are also colourful, and fleshed out enough so that the viewer gets to know them, but not enough that they know them completely.

The past is something hidden for these characters, in many ways that is a thematic point of the film. The film is truly about redemption, and as we follow the moving drama within we may even come to understand something within ourselves. It is truly a fitting end to this three film exploration into hate remorse and revenge.

Lady Vengeance, or 'Sympathy for Lady Vengece' if you like, felt as if it should have been a lot less underwhelming than it actually was. The film feels wavy, distant and is very airy in its approach and general atmosphere but rather than create a dreamlike or a particularly uncanny atmosphere, these things just make the film feel as if it's grinding along rather than effortlessly sailing. Similallry to Oldboy, the director's preceding film and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK, their following film, the film leaves you slightly unfulfilled because the creators are so in love with their 'off the wall' content and their bringing of bizarre style to, what are, essentially genre pictures falling amidst crime and romance, respectively.

There is, however, no denying director Park Chan-wook has a distinct style. His airy, misty and dreamlike approach to an idea or a premise as relatively simple as the one demonstrated in Lady Vengeance masks the film's short comings and presents something as familiar and, dare I say, as mundane as what's seen in Lady Vengeance which in turn disguises it as a work of high art. Really, it's anything but and whilst I'm all for a good revenge picture; some of my favourite films are revenge pictures, all the fun and all the energy, whilst quite possibly paying homage to film-noir or revenge films of old, is sapped out of Lady Vengece in one swoop, leaving an inconsistent colour palette; a lot of iffy surrealism and an uneven balance of atmosphere.

The vengeful lady of the title is a certain Lee Geum-ja (Yeong-ae Lee), who goes through a bit of an emotional grinder before practically putting someone else through one quite literally. She has a little help form a few others, in the process. As a protagonist, Geum-ja has that innocent look and the actress carries a quaint expression on her face that just makes you want to root for her. She's delicate, but versatile; smart but not overly confident and whilst not physically imposing or a typically 'hard bodied' revenge driven lead, she carries a certain menace through her determination to find who she's looking for. Needless to say, there is a lot of the 'lady' before we get to the 'vengeance'.

And what a quest for vengeance. After being falsely imprison for some years for the supposed murder of a young schoolboy, Guem-ja is released and is determined to go all vigilante on us to try and bring the real killer to justice. It's a good set up, something that on paper might have one or two groan until they learn it's not the latest American summer vehicle for an A-list star to pile up a body count, instead, it's an airy and mysterious Korean film directed by a man whose films they might've stumbled across in the past. But the film is additionally playing us, having the lead as an out and out protagonist rather than an anti-hero when it emerges she did nothing in the first place. Her quest to find the real criminal is littered with wavy incident and there's a nice idea towards the denouement linked to how Guem-ja actually chooses to achieve her vengeance and whether spiritually finding her target is more rewarding than being the one to deliver the fatal blow.

So the idea is a wrongfully imprisoned individual released from prison and out to find the real bad guys, whilst in the middle they will find time to rendez-vous with long, lost daughters and get short-term employment doing whatever as they re-build themselves and prepare for the mission. In-between all this, we'll get a few flashbacks of prison life and how certain inmates made it into jail as well. Guem-ja's rebuilding is enjoyable, if nothing spectacular as she gets a job as a baker (which itself is a very precise and creative job, echoing what she feels she must do in the long run) and revisits a couple of paroled prisoners. Her reunification with her daughter who has been adopted and lives in Australia felt as if it should've tugged at more heartstrings than it did. But it's the style that's the focus here and Park Chan-wook merely makes the process a little different than usual rather than he does make it an extraordinary piece of work.

Given its climax and what occurs during that, the film has sort of, in a very seductive manner earned the right for its lead character to ever so slightly turn to the camera and ever so slightly deliver a little speech about atoning. If this had happened in most other films of this nature, there'd be an outcry to do with how revenge is justified and how it's glamorised and put across as 'the answer' but here, we should pay special attention to just what Guem-ja's involvement in the denouement actually is – perhaps she has earned the right to lecture us on atoning because her mission was to 'get' the real perpetrator but not necessarily to 'get back at' them in the physical way others are given the chance to. This means the film is suggesting Guem-ja be seen as some sort of deliverer of evil, something that really does break away from the film's 'type'. Too bad it was right at the very end.

i usually don't enjoy movies that contain gore, suspense, and violence. still, sympathy for lady vengeance was undoubtedly, a movie worth watching. even for those who actively dislike movies in this certain genre, sympathy for lady vengeance is an absolute must. out of the trilogy, this one was the one i enjoyed most. there was nothing overly-excessive and/or gratuitous (which i honestly found oldboy and sympathy for mr vengeance had a bit of), and it definitely cannot be considered a brain-candy film. with an extremely intelligent and interesting plot, and visually stunning cinematography, it was a spectacular piece of art, from the start to the finish, and had me thinking about it and talking about it for days afterward.

The final instalment of Park's Revenge Trilogy concluded well. In fact, I personally feel that it is the best out of the three film, excellent cinematography and beautiful classic music that blended perfectly well into the story. Lee Youngae gives fantastic performance in her role, a complete impression from her previous kind-hearted and sweet looking role in "Jewel in the Palace". Cold and filled with vengeance , yet she exudes fine elegance with her subtle body language and facial expression. The soundtrack works well at suitable moments, infusing classic into this art-house film. It was a pity the film didn't win any grand awards in the Venice Film Festival, Park definitely deserves recognition for his excellent works.

I saw this at the 2005 TIFF to a packed house.

This is the 3rd in a trilogy of revenge stories from CW Park. It was good, though, in my view, not as good as Old Boy. I didn't see the first of the trilogy.

I was, shall I say, somewhat disappointed with this. My expectations were, perhaps unrealistically high. But let me tell you what my biggest beef was and how you might avoid the same: REVENGE: Having seen Old Boy and experiencing such an intellectually devious revenge, I expected the same thing. I have to say, while the circumstances surrounding the revenge was interesting, it wasn't captivating. My advice -- go see this film, but don't think of it as a 'revenge film'. Don't think there's any link to Old Boy, because there isn't. It's definitely a different movie, and is just a story that has a revenge motif lurking beneath, but it's really not 'the key' to this movie. The key to the movie is about a woman who learns and takes action for being so gullible.

WHY SHOULD YOU SEE IT? Having presented the big downer, there still are still really good reasons to see this.

STYLE: I loved the style on this movie. There were great opening shots, very appropriate music and the visuals to the opening credits are really outstanding. The graphics with the credits actually play into the movie later on (at least for colour if not for some images). Very creative, very slick, with a couple great transitions between scenes.

STORY: This is a moving tale at an imprisoned woman looking to right previous wrongs. It's interesting to watch the pieces fall into place and holds together nicely.

Overall, this is a good movie with a few really good moments.

I spent about 1/8 of the film watching allusions to the protagonist's victimization and the remaining 7/8 watching her be a pathological, cold and manipulative b-word. By the end I felt nothing for her. If anything my heart went out to her former cell mates.

There were a lot of unnecessary scenes that did nothing to advance the plot. They felt as though the director were just being self-indulgent.

The fact that the protagonist and her daughter appeared crazy caused both characters to fall backward into the pool full of sickos that filled the diorama.

I think the film got lost in its own style and the protagonist just didn't strike me as believable.

Overrated but stylistically enjoyable.

I had the luxury of watching this last night and was awed by it's sheer brilliance. I don't want to delve into the story, as you must see it for yourself to savor the fantastic story like a glass of red wine.

The story revolves around a young woman sentence to jail due to murdering a young boy. Upon release she then embarks on a journey of redemption for the crime committed.

The cast's acting is impeccable on all sides. with sumptuous photography and a moving musical score consisting of such great composers as Vivaldi.

If you are a lover of foreign cinema this is a definite DO NOT MISS movie!

Aged 19, Geum-ja Lee confesses as the woman who abducted and murdered the child Won-mo Park. At the time the tabloids cause a clamour against her but this dies down once she is inside and forgotten. She is reached out to inside and finds faith and redemption. However almost 14 years later she is released and decides she no longer has need for this and sets out to catch up with those she knew from inside her prison, all the while working up to her plan to take revenge on the man who robbed her of this chunk of her life.

Having surprised myself by how much I liked Oldboy, I decided to watch this film as a follow-up. For the majority of it, the story has enough to it to hold the interest easily; the actual core deed is not as interesting on its own as it is shorn of the mystery of Oldboy, however in theory this means it is more about the people and the emotional impact of the act and the vengeance more than the violence. I say in theory because I must be honest and say that I found it a lot less emotionally engaging than I would have liked. In some ways it is strong in this area but mostly it didn't have the heart that I thought it was trying to get to. The narrative is still enough to fill the running time but the second half is, dare I say it, a bit duller than it should have been just because the humanity wasn't there.

Park must shoulder some responsibility for this but he does make up for it with the style and delivery that drew me into Oldboy. He has scaled it back from that (hence the feeling that this was meant to be more about the heart) but it is still visually engaging and uses various techniques to enhance the delivery. Yeong-ae Lee appears to have been given more insight into the material than I was because her delivery is full of emotion and hurt. She brings it out whenever she can but for some reason the film generally doesn't support her in this. The support cast are mostly good but the film belongs to her and is best when the scenes centre on either her story or her character.

Overall though, not as good as the praise and ratings here would suggest but still an engaging film on several levels. Stylish and interesting it only stuttered by being surprisingly emotionally muted for large chunks where I felt it needed to be more convincing and impacting. Fans of the other Park films will enjoy it as a conclusion to the trilogy but it is hard not to feel that it could have done more.

Now Lady Vengeance was a nice piece of cinematography, it was stylish and competent and had the kind of polish you expect from a particularly good Hollywood movie. To some extent I think this may have let it down.

While Lady Vengeance is part of a trilogy its not a trilogy in the sense that it follows a storyline or set of characters from earlier in its series. Rather its a part of a trilogy of films the explore the theme of revenge or vengeance.

The previous two movies may have contained both gratuitous and graphic images, but given the subject it was kind of expected, perhaps its a certain amount of prejudice on my part but I can believe this kind of brutality occurs in parts of Korea.. In any case apart from one scene where the violence was merely implied (it was the beating of a woman) Lady Vengeance was far less horrific than its siblings.

The film itself wasn't let down by a lack of violence, indeed it contained plenty and some other disturbing scenes as well. But the story didn't have the same raw edge as the first two. Mr Vengeance layered itself with multifaceted reasons and inferred the different things that revenge actually means. Old Boy well its difficult to tell you why Old Boy is so great without giving it away.

Lady V in contrast gave away all her secrets quite early on and the movies centered upon how she got to the point where she could exact her revenge. An interesting story but because it opened up so quickly didn't offer the startling twists and turns that I found made the first two great.

I started to lose faith as this film got nearer to the end, increasingly asking, "and then what?" I think that it suffered unfairly from comparisons to Park Chan-wook's previous film, Oldboy. I did really enjoy the main character, even though her very personality is hard to pin down thanks to the machinations of the plot. The other characters are interesting, but there are a lot of them, and it's hard to tell who's who after a while. In general, there are several confusing aspects of this film that made me feel as if I would need a full plot summary after watching it.

I do think that this film is saying something interesting and important about revenge, and that this is reflected in the somewhat-slow concluding portion of the film. The "message" does strike me as a tad bit obvious, but then there are a lot of different ways to react to the protagonist's decisions near the end, so there does seem to be a worthwhile amount of ambiguity. I think the best parts of the film are the jail flashbacks and the adoption subplot. Once we get fully into the vengeance, the film becomes more contemplative, but somewhat less interesting.

I saw this film at Sitges Cinema festival and, nearly everybody was delighted, but me. I was really disappointed because i saw one year before old boy and i could not help to think about it as i was seeing this new film. Lady has sometimes an incomprehensible narration and, i think, that its black humor is not very funny. I found that it was less violent than old boy but its violence and woman s revenge is a bit insane. Nevertheless, the pictures and way of filming keeps on being superb. The plot is , also, slow, and i think that it is hard for the spectator to put himself in the place of the main character. It's interesting however to see how Chan Wook takes similar places in the two films, for example schools and the prisons. Also, the drawing of Wook of the main character shows a woman who needs a redemption, searched in revenge. I would recommend this film, but not to be compared with Old Boy because if it is the case, i think that that could cause a bit of disappointment. I give it a 7 .

There I was, in Sitges' film festival, in Barcelona, where one year ago Chan-Wook Park had won his prize for the great masterpiece Old Boy. This time he was presenting his last movie "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" to end the revenge trilogy.Everyone was waiting for the movie to start, all Park's fans and the lady at the festival announced the director's arrival. There he came in, the Korean director with the translator, trying to explain the meaning of his surname in Korean, and talking about loads of stuff - except the movie. Finally he thanked people for making his movie Old Boy "win a lot of money". I think is this personality that makes Park's movies so special. Just like this last one, its a beautiful bizarre movie, like its creator. The audience was already amazed with the starting credits of unusual beauty that just took the breath away from all audience and guarantied that the movie was going to be something different. Truth is that the movie is different, at least more different than his early Old Boy. This time he had created a movie where the story didn't count as much, but maybe the visual side of it, images that contain so much beauty that just makes the movie already worthy of seeing. The story is also really good, charged with all sort of surrealism and irony that makes it extremely interesting. Also, this time the director had treated vengeance with another style, more beautifully and also comprehensive, accomplishing that the audience can identify themselves with the main character, Geumja. When it was ended, the movie received a warmly applause from an audience, including myself, that hadn't been disappointed and that thought the director had done a great and bizarre job to end his trilogy.

But it's not! Even the most disappointing movie that I have seen from Park Chan Wook to date (haven't seen "I'm a cyborg but that OK" yet), it's still better than other directors best work! And when I say worst, it's as you can see from my rating, not a bad movie, but we have been spoiled (or I have at least), by his other movies. This is shot and edited in a great way, but it's the plot that is the least interesting and gripping one (if you compare it with the others ...)

The others being two movies that complete his Vengeance trilogy. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance & Old Boy being the other two movies, but as with the Leone Dollar Trilogy, there is no connection to one another. Only the main theme is the same throughout: Vengeance. A theme that he likes as he "confessed" in an interview at the International Film Festival at Berlin. Also seen in his first movie JSA (Joint Security Area) and his short film for Three Extremes!

This is not a bad movie. The issue is that it could have been great had it been given a tighter focus.

There are roughly three different A-plots going on here.

1. We have the revenge story, which is the leading story only by the fact that it has the most screen time.

2. The story about Lady's life in prison, which was interesting in it's own right and I would have enjoyed more if it showed us how

3. The story about her daughter, which begins as a teen pregnancy, continues with the child's adoption to an Australian couple, the daughter turning out to be a psychotic little brat who ultimately serves no purpose to the prison story nor the revenge story.

These are all A-plots, not B-plots. Each would make a compelling movie on their own. Yes, they are all tied to the same person, but other than that they are all complete narratives that seem to be battling for supremacy. It would have been good to show a distinct before and after of Lady - showing us her character arc.

As it is we don't see a concrete development from her as a troubled teen to an unstable broken mind. We need to understand her a lot better, but due to the odd time editing and scene placement choices the plot lines don't intertwine all that well.

My suggestion for how this could have been fixed is to either tell the story chronologically (as seen in Amelie, another complicated narrative that flowed surprisingly well), or to make it extremely clear that all these stories are headed in the same direction to one focused goal (as seen in the Kill Bill movies, which also had extended flashbacks all effecting one character but due to the tight focus none of it seemed unnecessary).