Six of the best Park Chan-wook scenes

Park Chan-wook’s acclaimed and var­ied body of work has a hand­ful of core themes. Whether it’s the goth­ic over­tones of Stok­er, the super­nat­ur­al hor­ror of Thirst, the sur­re­al tech­no­log­i­cal dreams of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, or the vio­lent revenge of Old­boy and the rest of the Vengeance Tril­o­gy, the South Kore­an direc­tor spe­cialis­es in draw­ing real emo­tion out of out­landish fantasies.

Vio­lence or lust is almost always trans­gres­sive in Park’s work, and often comes with a dis­turb­ing twist. With his lat­est effort, The Hand­maid­en, arriv­ing in cin­e­mas, we’ve picked out six mem­o­rable scenes from his impres­sive filmography.

“I want to eat some­thing liv­ing.” There are some pret­ty depraved sequences in Old­boy, but the infa­mous octo­pus sequence stands out. After a gru­elling open­ing act, Park shows Dae-su Oh’s ani­mal­is­tic nature and his all-con­sum­ing desire for vengeance in the most gra­tu­itous way pos­si­ble in a sushi restau­rant. The character’s first meal fol­low­ing a decade-and-a-half of dumplings is a live octo­pus that con­tin­ues to writhe around as Oh goes to town on the unsus­pect­ing cephalo­pod. While it’s prob­a­bly not wise to go on a quest for ret­ri­bu­tion on an emp­ty stom­ach, his choice of first meal is fas­ci­nat­ing­ly grotesque.

By com­par­i­son to the rest of the Vengeance Tril­o­gy, first instal­ment Lady Vengeance is more ele­gant and method­i­cal. What sets Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee) apart from the pro­tag­o­nists of Old­boy and Sym­pa­thy for Mr Vengeance is her approach to get­ting her ​‘jus­tice’ – instead of sim­ply going after the man who wronged her and stole her child, Kill Bill-style, Le exacts her vengeance on Baek (Min-sik Choi) via the bereaved par­ents of his oth­er child victims.

The result is a deeply trou­bling tor­ture scene in which the par­ents form an order­ly queue as they await their turn to tor­ture Baek. As with the oth­er Vengeance films, Park uses extreme vio­lence as a form of moral inquiry. In keep­ing with the director’s pitch per­fect gal­lows humour, a dis­cus­sion begins con­cern­ing the most appro­pri­ate order for Baek to be tor­tured in. By the scene’s end, humanity’s capac­i­ty for vio­lence is more clear than Lee’s redemption.

Park’s sole roman­tic com­e­dy and prob­a­bly his weird­est work, I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK is a colour­ful and fan­tas­ti­cal love sto­ry that plays out entire­ly in a hos­pi­tal for the men­tal­ly ill. Cha Young-goon (Soo-jung Lim) believes she’s a cyborg, and there­fore doesn’t require food to live – instead, she charges her­self using a tran­sis­tor radio. The film has the same under­ly­ing melan­choly as the many of the director’s oth­er works, as Cha unknow­ing­ly suf­fers through mal­nu­tri­tion as she if left to live out her delusion.

The film’s most arrest­ing moment arrives at the halfway mark, when fel­low patient Park Il-sun (Rain) plays along with Cha’s fan­ta­sy in order to con­vince her to eat. As he removes her top, the tone shifts from goofy to unset­tling, as the con­se­quences of Cha’s ill­ness snaps into focus. In a mat­ter of sec­onds, Park proves that his abil­i­ty to elic­it a vis­cer­al emo­tion­al response from his audi­ence is not reserved for his hor­ror and thriller films.

The best action scene in Park’s back cat­a­logue in a bench­mark for action scenes every­where. Yet the sin­gle take fight sequence in Old­boy isn’t a tri­umph of showy chore­og­ra­phy – in fact its ​‘messi­ness’ is part of what makes it so com­pelling. In one unbro­ken shot, Dae-su Oh bat­tles his way through a cor­ri­dor full of goons in order to get to the next lead in his quest for revenge. He gets bat­tered along the way but leaves a trail of destruc­tion in his wake. In a series of films that ques­tions how grat­i­fy­ing vengeance ulti­mate­ly is, this scene is prob­a­bly the most thrilling and reward­ing Park has ever com­mit­ted to film.

Giv­en that Park is fix­at­ed with sex­u­al and/​or vio­lent trans­gres­sions in nature, what bet­ter crea­ture to explore than the vam­pire? Ear­ly on, Thirst sets up plen­ty of bound­aries to cross – the main char­ac­ter, Priest Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song), being a Catholic priest who, through unfor­tu­nate and grue­some cir­cum­stances, is forced to drink human blood to survive.

As he wres­tles with his new­found crav­ing for human flesh, he also expe­ri­ences desire for his child­hood friend’s wife, Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim), who is sim­i­lar­ly repressed and more than will­ing to start an affair with him. Even­tu­al­ly he comes clean about his pow­ers, result­ing in a scene that would not feel out of place in a super­hero movie, as Tae-ju jumps around some rooftops.

Park’s Eng­lish-lan­guage debut is a goth­ic hor­ror with­out mon­sters, and quite pos­si­bly the most twist­ed com­ing-of-age sto­ry around. India Stoker’s (Wasikows­ka) open­ing nar­ra­tion that ​“a flower can’t change what colour it is”, spoked over images of white flow­ers stained red, is about as sub­tle as a sledge­ham­mer – but when Park final­ly reveals how the blood got there, the moment is haunt­ing. India’s sex­u­al awak­en­ing is intrin­si­cal­ly linked to her blood­lust, and the end of her tran­si­tion into adult­hood is com­plet­ed with the film’s blood­i­est act of violence.