Best Park Chan-wook Movies, Ranked

Twenty years after dropping jaws with its graphic carnage and outrageous twists, while giving a whole new meaning to the words “Hammer time,” Oldboy is back in theaters, restored and remastered for a new generation by distributor Neon. It’s a well-deserved victory lap for one of the most influential movies of the new century. For plenty of American viewers, this flamboyantly savage revenge thriller opened a window into a whole world of eclectic, sometimes transgressive South Korean film. Will it do the same in rerelease, acting as a gateway drug all over again?

Besides spurring interest in the national cinema that spawned it, Oldboy introduced a lot of people to the visionary behind the camera, one of the leading provocateurs of his country or any other, Park Chan-wook. Although the earlier Joint Security Area had earned him some fans around the world, it was the so-called Vengeance Trilogy — with Oldboy at its center — that moved Park to the forefront of “extreme cinema,” that global movement of anatomically explicit genre movies that gained notoriety and popularity in the early aughts. At a time when American video stores were flooded with unrated imports from all over, Park offered a more refined affront to the squeamish: the brutal violence and frank carnality of the grind house, delivered with the craft and care one expects of the art house.

Oldboy remains Park’s most iconic work, officially remade once and unofficially ripped off many more times. Accessible in its hard-core thrills, it’s a good pick for your first Park Chan-wook movie. But it shouldn’t be anyone’s last. Park, after all, made interesting movies before, and he’s made better ones since, all while continuing to chase his particular, peculiar preoccupations: puzzle-box narratives with concealed secrets, flashback structures, sanities shattered, bonds of trust broken, and, okay, yes, the alluring and ruinous power of revenge. The 11 features below all offer some variation on those themes while progressively furthering Park’s mastery of composition, rhythm, and performance. Most of them are worth watching — for their visual pleasures, if nothing else. Just don’t expect too much from the first couple; every seasoned Oldboy was a green Youngboy once.

In moviemaking, as in life, you have to crawl before you can walk. And crawl is definitely the operative word when it comes to Park’s little-seen feature debut, a sluggishly paced crime-land soap he made in his 20s, back when his passion far outpaced his chops. Scored to an endless blare of saxophone that’s aiming for noir but hits easy listening instead, this tale of a gangster (Lee Seung-chul) who falls in love with the boss’s mistress (Na Hyun-hee) is like an off-key karaoke rendition of countless superior genre movies. Only a few scenes — like a crosscutting chase involving a slowly descending elevator — betray hints of the singularly twisted sensibility and supreme formal prowess that will come to define the director’s work. All told, it’s very easy to see why Park would essentially disown his first movie; it was barely released outside South Korea, and for that he seems quite relieved.

A suicidal saxophonist (Lee Geung-young), a buffoonish sociopath (Kim Min-jong), and a desperate mother (Jung Sun-kyung) embark on a pointless, haphazard crime spree in this obnoxiously zany outlaw comedy, which arrived five years after The Moon Is … the Sun’s Dream. Park seems just as embarrassed of his equally hard-to-find second feature, blaming its commercial and critical failure on that old standby, creative differences: The producers were supposedly hoping for something like Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional, while Park would later cite Abel Ferrara as the intended point of reference. The final product resembles nothing so much as one of the countless chatty, glib Tarantino knockoffs that were unfortunately all the rage at the time. Trio is very much the work of a young director eager to make a name for himself, though it’s not as if Park has ever entirely outgrown the penchant for grotesque showboating the film anticipated. For better or worse, he’s still the kind of guy liable to get a kick out of zooming through the bloody hole a bullet puts in someone’s hand.

Leave it to Park to arrange a meet-cute in the cuckoo’s nest. The director’s unsurprisingly demented stab at romantic comedy sends sparks flying, so to speak, between a self-diagnosed bionic woman (Im Soo-jung) and a compulsive kleptomaniac (pop star Rain), both institutionalized in a wacky asylum for their delusions. Although it arrived on the heels of his three consecutive revenge thrillers, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK wasn’t so much a change of pace for Park as a slightly kinder, gentler, quirkier spin on the elements that were fast cementing into signatures: mordant humor, nonlinear storytelling, warped psychologies. But Cyborg lacks the tight plotting of those earlier movies, and its attempts to develop an Amélie-ish love story for its mentally ill characters without romanticizing their illnesses proved a difficult needle to thread. Park’s later portraits of mad love, like Thirst and The Handmaiden, are much more deserving of ours.

Immaculately punishing. Park’s reputation as a 21st-century bad boy of extreme cinema began with the first entry in his celebrated, thematically linked Vengeance Trilogy. Formally speaking, it was a quantum leap forward for him — the movie in which he honed his craft to a surgical precision, every scene perfectly shot and cut to draw us through the cruel cause-and-effect logic of his plot. Unfortunately, that plot is little more than a sadistic string of contrivances, inflicting unspeakable horrors upon several unlucky souls, including a deaf-mute factory worker, his dying sister, his anarchist lover, and his wealthy former employer (played by Park regular and Parasite star Song Kang-ho). There’s a hint of class critique to all this madness and misfortune, which grows inexorably out of economic desperation. Mostly, though, it’s just Park pulling the strings of dark destiny, applying his newly godlike powers with a rather Old Testament lack of mercy. You watch Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in a state of numbed awe, distantly admiring how realistically an electrocuted leg twitches as a pool of urine forms around it.

While Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy move with the ruthless forward momentum of their bloodthirsty characters, the last of Park’s outrageously violent revenge thrillers is more roundabout, more knotty, more digressive. Lady Vengeance is structured like a mystery, slowly unraveling the motives of a convicted murderer (Lee Young-ae) through an achronological plot that depicts her life before, during, and after incarceration. Whether the movie really has much to say about the psychic burden of revenge is debatable, as is any argument about it subverting the dark pleasures of the genre. Does the hand-wringing severity of Lady Vengeance’s grim upshot really jell with the playful grotesqueries offered en route? Either way, it’s never less than gripping watching the puzzle pieces of Park and Chung Seo-kyung’s script slowly fall into place, against the colorful backdrop of a jailhouse ensemble and to the accompaniment of a Baroque, Vivaldi-quoting score.

Early rumors that Park’s first movie in English would be a remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt proved exaggerated: Stoker is more of a loose, taboo-teasing riff on that classic, borrowing the barest bones of its premise for a brand-new southern-gothic story of an oddball teenage outcast (Mia Wasikowska) who, after the death of her father, becomes entangled in the dark deeds of her estranged uncle (a deliciously insinuating Matthew Goode). What the movie really resembles is one of Brian De Palma’s odes to the master, finding an opportunity for kinky, voyeuristic mischief in the silhouette of Hitchcockian suspense. An early sequence feverishly crosscutting between a murder and the discovery of the body is just the tip of the virtuosic iceberg. Stoker isn’t much more than an exercise in gloriously perverse style, freighted with the dangling threat of incestuous corruption, but that’s enough. If nothing else, it proved that even Hollywood can’t tame Park.

Touching is not a word that generally leaps to mind when thinking of a Park Chan-wook movie — unless that movie is Joint Security Area, Park’s third feature and something of an outlier in his outré body of work. Based on the novel DMZ, by Park Sang-yeon, the film begins like a slightly stiff gloss on A Few Good Men with a Swiss officer (the future Lady Vengeance herself, Lee Young-ae) called in to investigate the killing of two soldiers at the border between North and South Korea. Gradually, through extended flashbacks, Park reveals the truth about what happened — how the incident grew out of something hopeful, a friendship that blossomed where the countries met. Blessed with a powerhouse cast (including the movie star Lee Byung-hun and Song, in his first collaboration with the director), Joint Security Area put Park on the world-cinema map. It’s a different kind of provocation from him, one that dared to voice a yearning dream of peace and even reunification — a dream that, judging from the success of JSA (which made more money in Korea than any film before it), plenty of others shared.

The single-shot brawl in the hallway where Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) fends off a gaggle of goons with a hammer is one of the funniest, most astonishing pieces of fight choreography ever filmed. It also exemplifies the operatic comic-book spirit, the brazen too-muchness, of the movie for which Park will probably always be remembered. Oldboy is every bit as depraved as the tales of vengeance he made before and after it, but its genre alchemy is different — a gonzo cocktail of Japanese manga and Greek tragedy. As Oh, who even looks like a drawing, embarks on a single-minded crusade for retribution, oblivious to the larger revenge scheme coming together around his own, the plot tumbles into a labyrinth of revelations so shocking and obscene they threaten to push the movie over the top into comedy. There’s a kind of crazed, rock-and-roll joy to the way Park pounds his own hammer on senses, delicate sensibilities, and any semblance of good taste. No wonder Tarantino loved Oldboy at Cannes; he knows first-rate pulp fiction when he sees it.

Ever heard the one about the priest who walks into a hospital and walks out a vampire? Park’s intense, exquisitely Catholic monster movie is, in some respects, a dark joke told at the expense of its main character: a holy man (Song, in the most haunted of his performances for the director) whose martyr complex compels him to volunteer for a dangerous medical study in pursuit of a cure to a deadly disease. Rather than kill him, the experiment leaves him with a hankering for blood and a nightly moral dilemma as to how he’ll satiate it. Thirst is a wild good time — especially once it introduces an endlessly mistreated housewife (Kim Ok-bin, in a remarkably volcanic turn) who embraces life as a creature of the night, delivering terrible comeuppance on those who have used and abused her in a scene that recalls the paralyzing terror of Near Dark’s barroom massacre. In the tug-of-war between the two monsters, Park almost seems to playfully acknowledge the divided impulses of revenge movies, his and others’ — the way they indulge the dark desires of the audience while asking us to feel bad about having those desires. Wickedly meditating on guilt, repression, and the rationalizations of the supposedly pious, it’s the rare movie from this director that goes straight for the brain as well as the jugular.

Thirty years into his career, Park no longer seems quite so hell-bent on shocking his audience. His most recent movie is at once his least perverse in ages and one of his very best: a melodramatic policier in which a detective (Park Hae-il) finds his judgment impaired by his attraction to a key suspect, a potential femme fatale (Lust, Caution’s Tang Wei) who may have murdered her husband. That’s not half of what’s really going on in the movie, which lacks the transgressive violence and sex of Park’s most famous thrillers but not their twisty psychological architecture; part of the genius of the film is that it hides a wellspring of sweaty, dysfunctional emotion under a veneer of classical restraint. Decision to Leave is even more indebted to Hitchcock than Stoker was, not just in its portrait of obsessive, voyeuristic longing but also in the way that Park stages the ever living hell out of every moment — exploiting the endless visual possibilities of mirrors — finding breathtaking ways to shoot even the simplest of actions and conversations. (Rarely has a Best Director winner at Cannes so plainly deserved its prize.) By the end, more than one truth has been uncovered; next to the big revelations of the plot lies the evidence that Park has always had a lot more to offer than edginess.

The Park Chan-wook movie where it all comes together — an ingenious trapdoor thriller with a soul. Transporting the Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea, Park spins the deliriously entertaining tale of an heiress (Kim Min-hee), a pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri ), and a con man (Ha Jung-woo), all playing deceptive parts in a scheme where the mark keeps changing. Perfecting the delayed reveals and flashback games of his earlier thrillers, Park builds The Handmaiden in layers, doubling back constantly to show past events from new perspectives and with new information, conning a grateful audience right along with the characters. Were that all the movie offered, it would still be a delightful, kinky romp. But Park uses his sleight of hand to make a larger point about the truths people hide from themselves and — in the increasingly feminist thrust of the twisty plot — the roles women have to play to survive a world of men eager to manipulate them. Gradually, a love story begins to stubbornly, rapturously form in the space between the masquerades, to the surprise even of the masqueraders themselves. In a filmography of shocking visions, the sincerity of The Handmaiden might be the most shocking yet; its biggest twist is the reveal of a true romantic hiding behind all that extremity.