Early in the set-up for Korean director Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, we observe a deaf-mute man, Ryu (actor Shin Ha-kyun), slurping his noodles in a tiny apartment he shares with his invalid sister. The sister, desperately ill and in need of a new kidney, is screaming in agony, but of course Ryu, a one-time art student who stills wear his punk badge of DayGlo blue hair, but who evidences no other signs of aspiring to be hip or cool, can't hear her.
We can, and so can a roomful of horny young men a very thin wall away in the next apartment. The sight of these horndogs jacking off to what they perceive as erotic noises coming from next door readies us for this director's brand of brutal realism, which he himself concedes is "the reality of one who considers the world a barren desert. A desert is originally a dry, cold place that is unfair, obscure, and totally unpredictable." Park is no poseur. Every minute of the 121 minutes of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance will live up to this challenge.
"I'm a good person. I'm a hard worker." These words from Ryu's mind come to us not from his lips, of course, but from a letter he writes to a radio "agony aunt," words that play in our ears as our eyes take in Ryu's workplace, which appears to be a hellish, industrial dead zone whose end-product is some sort of sludge. The sludge is not cleaning up in the marketplace, and as a result the factory boss, Park Dong-Jin (Song Kang-ho) closes the plant, leaving Ryu jobless.
Desperate to help his sister get a new kidney, and told by a doctor that there is no organ in the offing, Ryu answers an ad he finds in a public toilet, promising black-market organs. Despite the unappealing ambience of the organ center and its zombie-like staff, Ryu agrees to hand over his life savings and one of his own kidneys in return for a suitable match for his sister. Not surprisingly, the crooks take his money and his kidney, leaving him with nothing but a bottomless thirst for vengeance.
"There are good kidnappings and bad kidnappings," says Ryu's girlfriend, Youngmin (Bae Donna), a wellspring of good sex and very bad advice. A fierce devotee of a pro-Communist terrorist group (a police detective claims she was its only member) who finds the oddest moments to pass out her pamphlets, Youngmin convinces Ryu that the only way to regain his lost savings and obtain his sister's new kidney is to abduct the young daughter of his former boss.
The kidnapping unravels as badly as such acts inevitably do in a truly hard-boiled drama. The sister freaks out when she discovers the crime, killing herself. The little girl drowns accidentally while Ryu is arranging the burial of his sister near a river that was once their childhood playground. But you ain't seen nothing yet.
Body parts
After the police locate the body of his young daughter floating in the river, a detective gently quizzes Park Dong-Jin. "Have you ever done anything to provoke anybody?"
"I always thought I lived an honest life."
"That's what everybody says."
In South Korean films at least, people seek out their own justice. The cops just show up to collect the bodies. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has bodies aplenty. Even a cute delivery boy, with spiky red hair out of a bottle, falls victim. The worst of it for me were the autopsies. We don't see the coroner's knife at work, but merely gaze at the face of a father observing medical examiners cut up the body of his seven-year-old daughter. What the adults do to one another is a whole other story — most horrific or instructive is Park Dong-Jin's "interrogation" of the girlfriend, methods just shy of the war on terror.
All three leads are deadpan perfect, especially Shin Ha-kyun, whose blundering deaf-mute is played without the slightest concession to any agenda of disability. Ryu's relationship with his anarchy junkie of a girlfriend bears a slight resemblance to the delicious S/M between Kin Stanley and Richard Attenborough in the best misguided-kidnapping-of-a-little-girl film of all time, Bryan Forbes' Seance on a Wet Afternoon . I would have been content if Sympathy were merely a Korean homage to Seance. It is not.
We in the West know precious little Korean history. Filmmakers operating at the high level of Park Chanwook will fill us in, and throw a little philosophy in as tasty side-dish.
A consumer warning: fans of Chanwook's Old Boy, actually the second installment of the director's "revenge trilogy" — Sympathy is the first part — may not find Sympathy to their taste. I hated Old Boy — in fact, ran out of a screening — but rather enjoyed the more direct approach to urban carnage envisioned here. Ultimately, we all pick our poison, as well as our treats.