A vampire priest, an actress-turned-spy, a pornography antiquarian…nothing is off limits to Park Chan-wook, the legendarily bloody and slick filmmaker credited as a pioneer of the Korean New Wave.
Every few years he sets a new stunning benchmark that only he could possibly surpass, and with the release of his latest procedural Decision to Leave, it’s only natural to want to catch up on everything sick and stylish he’s done previously. With lots of streaming options (including some free ones!) you can dive in right away.
The Handmaiden (2016)
After his English-language debut Stoker (available on Disney+), Park Chan-wook returned to Korea to helm a film that interrogates the Korean identity itself during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. The result: one of the best films of the 21st century—a riotous, sensual and breath-taking affair spinning out over 2.5 hours, and another excellent addition to the period lesbian romance genre.
Every gasp of air, every blade slice, every brush against clothes: it’s all carefully calculated and constructed by someone at the top of their game. Stunning stuff!
Thirst (2009)
It did Catholic vampires before Midnight Mass, and violent horror couples on the fringes of society before next month’s Bones & All—Thirst is an underrated, ahead-of-its-time offering from Park Chan-wook. His third collaboration with screenwriter Seo-kyeong Jeong (there’s a reason Park’s female characters became infinitely better from Lady Vengeance onwards) the two writers borrowed plot details from Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and added a couple of vampires.
It packs wit and slapstick into its melancholy theorising on faith and urges, starring Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho regular Song Kang-ho—but the real star is Kim Ok-bin, matching Song with a world class performance when she was no older than 23.
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance
Not every filmmaker can make a revenge movie that’s equal parts soulful and visceral, but Park Chan-wook did it three whole times. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a sterile, troubling meditation on the spiralling, senseless ways in which violence prohibits justice ever being achieved. It’s dispassionate and airless in tone, making all the keenly observed human misery sting that much more.
Oldboy
Oldboy, the film that needs no introduction, is one of Park’s most explosive films; an urgent, in-your-face thriller about a man seeking revenge for revenge, a changed man after being confined in solitary for over a decade. Highlights include live octopus guzzling, hallway hammering, and a doozy of a shocking, operatic third act filled with glorious little grace notes, including a stunning ambiguous ending. It’s a great place to start, made all the more resonant by watching the rest of the trilogy.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Lady Vengeance, the best of the trilogy, goes deep on the mental stability of those who live with vengeful thoughts, and the first female protagonist of the trilogy offers a much more human, soulful version of revenge. Here, we don’t see what it’s like to seek vengeance until you are nothing more than a burnt-out husk—rather the idea of having to live with the emotional reality of trauma and injustice, especially with how they affect relationships with those we love. Plus, the vengeance itself is the most compelling of the three.
Joint Security Area
After he disavowed his first two 1990s films, Park Chan-wook made a splashy “debut” with his third feature, a murder mystery on the North-South Korean border, where the only suspects are the guards on either side. What starts as a twisty procedural gravitates into something incredibly warm, human, and ultimately tragic. It put Park on the map, becoming the highest-grossing Korean movie to date on first release.
The Little Drummer Girl: Season 1
John le Carre? Park Chan-wook? Florence Pugh?! Helming a miniseries is a trend many acclaimed directors are used to by now, but few have pulled off something as romantic and stylish as this. Before her Midsommar/Little Women breakout in 2019, Florence Pugh starred in this series about an actress forced to be a dissident in the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. All the Park Chan-wook touchstones of deception, doomed romance, and bursts of violence are all there, proving the director can master English-language thriller stories just as much as he does Korean ones.
