Saw Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, the second in Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy. This one follows a deaf and dumb man who is taking care of his ailing sister who needs a kidney transplant. He can find neither funds nor donors and is even cheated by some back-alley organ thieves. Eventually, he and his anarchist girlfriend come up with a kidnapping scheme where they take the toddler daughter of the deaf guy's boss. This scheme gets further and further out of control. The film starts off as a kind of wacky black comedy and winds up in a very ugly and unhappy place indeed.
The descent from wicked but lighthearted comedy to gruesome, dismal blood and guts is purposeful, I think. Vengeance brings happiness to no one in this film and there's so much revenge had. It taints the characters more and more as they commit ever more fully to extracting eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. When one character finally gets his revenge on another, he says "I know you're a good guy... but you know why I have to kill you." This isn't a bad-ass moment, just the period at the end of a long, rambling, downward-inflected sentence.
I enjoyed the film a good deal. It's fairly grim, but I could handle it, and there's amazing, beautiful scenes sprinkled throughout, often in the midst of the worst torments. One character holds up his shirt and slices at his abdomen with a razor blade. We close up on his wounds, leaking blood, as he drops his shirt again, the crisp white slowly turning red in long streaks. Eerie and repulsive and beautiful. We then cut to a reaction shot and the whole thing becomes absurd and silly. What a difficult and delightful film.
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