Review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance / 복수는 나의 것

I remember the first time I saw this movie, I was sitting in a dorm room, on my side, trying to find a way to get comfortable as the violence on-screen unfolded. I always muse upon how for some influential movies, songs, or even scents, we tend to associate them quite vividly with the act of experiencing.

I remember a lot of the times I watch movies I loved, even if I no longer remember the details of the movie or what I ate before I saw it.

The second time this was screened in front of me I was a sophomore in college and had bought a student ticket to a screening of it at the Walter Reade Theatre in Lincoln Center.

I had wanted to see it with an audience, as I wanted to see how people reacted to the more violent parts of the film.

To this day, I remember how the girl next to me must have had no idea what this movie was about, because as soon as it showed blood she started jumping and making little noises. Always check the trigger warnings—you’ll never know what you’ll get otherwise.

Anyways, here’s my review!

One man trying to help his sister gets accidentally involved in a vicious plot of revenge.

The main character of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is Ryu, who is both deaf and mute. He works long hours in a factory, despite his conditions, in order to conjure the funds to take care of not only himself, but his sick sister too. She’s in dire need of a kidney transplant, but Ryu doesn’t match what she needs and he has just been laid off of his job.

So, in an act of desperation, Ryu comes into contact with some organ dealers on the black market to exchange one of his kidneys for one she can use. However, when he shows up for the surgery, he wakes up with them gone—they literally stole his kidney.

They also took his severance money in the process, which means when an organ donor is found and the surgery canbe arrangd, Ryu doesn’t have the money to afford the operation. So of course his anarchist girlfriend suggests they kidnap the young daughter of the executive who just fired him.

They begin stalking the girl, but along the way, they decide to kidnap the daughter of the company president instead. They do so after luring her in, and Ryu tells his sister he’s babysitting the girl.

The girlfriend and Ryu send a ransom note to the executive, Dong-jin, and he decides to give them the money. But when Ryu goes to collect the funds and comes home, he realizes his sister learned about the truth behind the girl.

She kills herself, leaving him to find the body in a very unnerving scene. Ryu decides to bury his sister in the river where they used to play as children, but while he’s doing that, and because he’s deaf, he does not hear the girl falling into the river and drowning.

He leaves the scene, and the body is found, leading Dong-jin to hire an investigator to find her kidnappers. Not only is he out of a ton of cash, but his daughter as well.

The sister’s body is found, and a disabled man who witnessed Ryu’s unorthodox funeral gives some insight as to who exactly might’ve pulled off the murder of the girl. In the meantime, Ryu finds the organ traffickers and kills them.

Dong-jin finds the anarchist girlfriend and tortures her with electricity, killing a deliveryman with food in the process. When he gets ready to kill her, she warns him that her terrorist friends will find him and kill him, but he decides to kill her anyways.

Ryu comes to her apartment and watches the authorities take out her corpse, and then Dong-jin lures him in with a booby trap.

He brings Ryu to the river, and then drags him into the water. Slashing his Achilles tendons, he watches as Ryu drowns, then disembers the corpse. But just as he turns around to leave, the terrorists the girlfriend mention stab him in the chest and leave Dong-jin to die.

Overall Thoughts

This is a movie I keep returning to throughout the years, and there are plenty of reasons why. I find Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy interesting to watch because of how it portrays human emotion and the twisted feelings that come out through violence.

Certainly sometimes it is not justified, but you can trace the origin points of what made them into the person we’re watching on-screen. This is the first movie in the trilogy, but Oldboy gets even more twisted, and Lady Vengeance takes a step back.

This is my personal favorite though of the three, having seen all of them multiple times throughout the years.

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