Movies - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

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	Movies - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a 2002 South Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook. It is the first part of his "vengeance trilogy", followed by Oldboy
(2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
(2005).

The original Korean title means "Vengeance is Mine", but the alternate English title was ostensibly chosen to avoid confusion with the Japanese film of the same name.

The film was declared the best movie of 2002 by Harry Knowles.

Plot

Synopsis

A young deaf-mute man's failed plot to obtain a kidney for his ailing sister sets in motion a chain of events ending in a series of vengeful murders.

Story

The film opens in a factory where Ryu, a deaf-mute, is working. Later we see him speaking, through a combination of lip reading and sign language, with a doctor who explains the difficulty of finding the new kidney that his sister needs. He had intended to donate his own kidney, but he is not a matching tissue type.

In bed with his girlfriend, a radical leftist named Yeong-mi whom we see typing what appears to be a polemic calling for the deaths of capitalists, he wonders what he can do.

When he is fired from the factory, he contacts a black market organ dealer; if he pays the equivalent of $10,000 and lets them have his kidney, they say, they will find a kidney for his sister. In an abandoned building, he hands them the money and they put him to sleep; he awakes naked, in pain, and missing a kidney. He never hears from them again, and the loss is compounded when the doctor jubilantly reports that a kidney has been found and his sister can have it - but only if Ryu produces $10,000.

He and his girlfriend hatch a scheme to kidnap the daughter of his former boss, Dong-jin, in order to demand a ransom. The girl stays with his sister, who plays with her and keeps the girl from realizing that her parents are looking for her. The distraught father agrees to pay the ransom, but when Ryu goes out to collect (leaving his ex-boss tied up with a plastic bag over his head) his sister slits her wrists in the bathtub, leaving behind a note that she no longer wants to be a burden to him.

Ryu takes the girl and his sister's body into the countryside to bury her by a riverbed, a favorite place of theirs to play when they were both children. While he covers her body with rocks, the little girl falls into the river and drowns. Ryu, hearing nothing, fails to notice until it is too late.

Ryu and Dong-jin swear vengeance on those who have taken their loved ones. Yeong-mi arranges a meeting with the organ dealers, but Ryu goes in instead and slaughters them. Meanwhile Dong-jin, having pieced together the mystery of what happened to his daughter, tortures Yeong-mi with electric shocks that eventually kill her; before she dies, after telling her how sorry she is and begging him to stop, she claims that she belongs to a terrorist organization and that she has put his name on an assassination list; she warns him that if she dies, he will be killed.

Dong-jin catches Ryu and takes him to the spot in the river where his daughter's body was found. With Ryu's hands bound, Dong-jin tells him that he knows he is a good man but that he has no choice but to kill him. He cuts Ryu's Achilles tendons and he drowns.

Soon after, however, a group of men pull up in a car and stab Dong-jin to death. As he lays dying in the sun, they pin to his chest the polemic that Yeong-mi wrote. His dying gasps continue for minutes on end through the end credits.

Cast

Song Kang-ho
- Park Dong-jin
Shin Ha-kyun
- Ryu
Bae Du-na - Cha Yeong-mi (Ryu's girlfriend)
Lim Ji-eun - Ryu's sister

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Movies - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Plot

Synopsis

Story

Cast

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