How Revenge is Used in Korean Thrillers | Video Essay

Vengeance is a feeling often considered but rarely acted upon. It starts with a sense of personal injury, an injustice committed...that requires a resolution. A longing for a missing variable to an equation. A primal need to right a wrong... A gut-aching, teeth grinding indignation that boils into vivid musings of an unresolved anger. Vengeance thrives inside the four corners of our imagination. Which is why we find ourselves relating so viscerally to cinematic fantasies of revenge. Movies that

offer a satisfactory scratch to a universal itch. At the start of the 21 century, stories of revenge have become synonymous to South Korean cinema. There is just something in their exploration of vengeance that feels distinct. Something about the violence, the grit, the rage that let's you peek at a vaguely perceivable shared resentment. An idiosyncratic element that adds weight to their external ruminations of revenge. In today's video, we will be exploring how this theme of vengeance is used i

n several of their movies and what it's trying to say. Since the nature of these films has a lot to do with how they end, a few spoilers will follow. Be on the look out for the visual cues. Most revenge movies have a very simple premise but an extremely effective one. An evil deed made, the search for retribution and vengeance taken. A pattern that feels almost musical, if the journey is anything but a cathartic experience it would certainly feel out of tune. We follow a main character with an u

nderstandable motivation...like getting payback for the death of a dog... And that's all we need... it's enough to validate a main characters' parade of punishment. The characters on the screen become surrogates to our satisfaction... and there are a lot of these types of movies where the focus stays on the elaborate vengeance, like A Bittersweet Life and The Man From Nowhere but there are others that go a little bit further with what they are trying to say, like the harsh I Saw the Devil and th

e notorious Oldboy. Two extremely inventive journeys of revenge. In I Saw the Devil, a serial killer has brutally murdered the fiancée of the main character; Kim Soo-hyeon. Soo-hyeon is a secret agent, a well-trained man of the law that decides to point his expertise towards the devilish Kyung-chui. He plans out an elaborate game of catch and release. Soo-hyeon finds the serial killer, tortures him and then surprisingly...sets him free, only to repeat the process over and over again as a punishm

ent. In Oldboy, Oh Dae-su is the one who is initially receiving the punishment. He is imprisoned for fifteen years in a small room, being groomed, fed and kept alive and then set free. He has no idea why he was held captive or why they even let him go. He embarks on a ruthless scavenger hunt to find out who is responsible for his imprisonment but most importantly; what he did to deserve it. Dae-su and Soo-hyeon both follow a crimson path to fulfill their need for avengement, but the curious thin

g is that the filmmakers aren't interested in glorifying violence (although it is very bloody) but to warn of the consequences of acting out your vengeance, that the ultimate revenge no matter how cathartic can be corrosive. Soo-hyeon starts getting obsessed with the punishment of Kyung-chui, pushing towards more extreme acts. A process where he starts losing himself as he begins taking pleasure in the violence. It shows a continuous cycle where the abuser becomes the victim and the victim becom

es the abuser. Director Kim Jee-woon is trying to present that vengeance has an attractive pull that will eventually draw you in and transform you into what you are supposed to be fighting. The thematic core of the movie comes from a passage of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil": "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." The same can be said of Dae-su. He was a normal

person at first, an ill mannered drunk but still someone human that wouldn't actually kill or torture anyone. Once his family, freedom and life are taken away, he is only left as an instrument of vengeance. We see this with the other characters of the trilogy of vengeance. Ordinary people faced with an inhuman injustice, push themselves to do an equally brutal act. Vengeance becomes an intoxicating lapse of judgement that emotionally justifies our actions, but it only deals in the negative. The

director of Oldboy refers to it as a "fruitless endeavor" at the end the characters are left hollow. Soo-hyeon's efforts don't just punish the serial killer or himself, it also ruins the lives of the people in the way of his game. What we start to realize in Oldboy is that the story is actually about the vengeance of the antagonist. The well orchestrated and patiently executed plan by Woo-jin in response to the death his sister. It became his whole life, he even thanks Dae-su because his over fi

fteen-year vengeance has been a good distraction and invites him to relish in his own. After finalizing his revenge, his words become a self-fulfilling prophecy as his short-lived satisfaction can't hold back the haunting memory of the death of his sister and he can no longer bear it. "Revenge is about something that has already happened, and when you are trying to achieve vengeance, you are investing your everything into a venture that will lead you to no benefit at the end." Vengeance is the s

earch for justice... but it splits into two kinds. The first is an internal justice formed by our own personal upbringing, life experience or belief system. The second is an external justice decided by the laws we live under so we can maintain social order. These two help us make sense of what is right and what is wrong. Our personal justice lives inside what is socially acceptable but there are instances where these two can be in conflict with each other. We see this dilemma be explored in Moth

er. The main character is trying to prove the innocence of her mentally challenged son Do-joon, he is quickly found guilty of the murder of a young girl. The mother is sure her son is incapable of committing such a violent act and starts making her own investigation. We begin to notice that perhaps the main character's natural motherly instinct might be clouding her judgement. Justice, from the main character's perspective, is to protect her son at all cost...so, can protecting her only child go

beyond what is lawful? In The Chaser we see the inefficiency of the justice system and how the law can get in the way of itself. A serial killer is murdering call girls and the main character Joong-ho, an ex-cop turned pimp, is trying to catch him before another girl goes missing. The antagonist actually gets caught before the midpoint of the movie and even confesses to his current and past crimes, but he is let go for lack of evidence and also because the police want to save face from a previo

us public blunder. Joong-ho's personal justice is frustrated by the incompetence of the law... a notable pattern in Korean movies. We usually see a slow-witted characterization of cops. It's a commentary on how slow moving, comically absurd and ineffective justice can be. Individuals that happen upon a situation they are unprepared for and lead to an outcome that will inevitably be unsatisfying. We encounter this problem in Memories of Murder, we follow a rural police force struggling to capture

a serial killer. They are unable to control crime scenes, they use irregular investigative methods and coerce suspects into giving false confessions. After the amount of murders start to rise, a desperation for justice sets in even affecting the more level-headed detective Seo. Seo in contrast, is an adept, by the book detective that only follows the facts in front of him but his rationality is tested by his growing need for retribution. Seo is about to kill the prime suspect in the case until

he's confronted with evidence that they might have the wrong person. But at this point the detective's blinding need for personal justice supersedes any proof that goes against what he feels is right. The case represented in Memories of Murder is actually referring to South Korea's first recognized serial killer. He murdered ten women between t 1986 to 1991. These murders traumatized South Koreans especially the director Bong Joon-ho. That's why he set out to make the movie to answer a personal

question: "Why did we fail to catch the murderer?" He found that it was due to the darkness of the age. There was just a certain darkness in South Korea in the 1980's that facilitated these events to continue uninterrupted. We see one of the detectives having a very simplistic view of criminals. Detective Park states that he can recognize a criminal just by looking at them and throughout the movie we see the deterioration of this belief. After going through a league of suspects they are only lef

t with uncertainty. They are not close to knowing what the murderer looks like. He finally realizes that the world is far more complex. Justice remains unattainable when it's shrouded by doubt. At the end, the only resolution that Bong Joon-ho allows us to have is when Park looks directly at the camera as if looking thought the cinematic veil searching for the unknown face. The murderer among the audience. After several years the killer has been recently identified and Bong Joon-ho has finally b

een able to see that face that's been haunting him. Justice can be an elusive ideal that if fulfilled can feel incomplete... or too late. The lack of personal justice can feed into growing resentment. Being kept at arms length from what we feel is right resigns us to a bitter frustration. A character that represents this state of being extremely well is Lee Jong-su in the metaphorical Burning. He lives with an internalized anger that rises from a simmer to a boiling point throughout the movie. J

ong-su is an aspiring writer going through the motions of life. He lives at the mercy of decisions that aren't his, swallowing back familial and societal grievances trying to make sense of his place in the world. One day, Jong-su's childhood neighbor re-enters his life and they are seemingly on the path of starting a relationship until he's undramatically pushed aside by the enigmatic and well-off Ben. The trio then spark an awkward friendship. The main mystery of the movie is the unexplained di

sappearance of Hae-mi. One day she just vanishes without a trace. She is not answering her phone, her apartment has been cleaned out and no one else has heard from her in a while. The only lead Jong-su has is an odd conversation with Ben, the last night the trio were all together. Ben randomly confesses to him that he enjoys burning greenhouses...rundown ones that no one would miss. At first, one would see this information as somewhat concerning but as Jong-su continues his search for answers it

's obvious to see this as a sinister metaphor. There are a lot of little mysteries peppered across this movie made to make you question what is real. Is the well Jong-su saved Hae-mi from when they were kids also a metaphor or something he just doesn't remember? Who keeps calling him at night? Is Ben really a killer and if so, how did he do it? Even the act of vengeance at the end could just be a fantasy. We see Jong-su starting to write and the scene drifting away...we then switch to Ben's pers

pective. We get to see what he does with the kit Jong-su found in his bathroom earlier in the movie and then we are at the bloody final confrontation between the two. "This last scene could have happened in reality, but at the same time it could have also been a part of this novel that Jong-su is newly writing, [...]" The last scene could be attempt from the main character to give himself answers in world that won't share any. Be it fiction or reality, Ben is meant to represents the mystery of t

he world, and Jong-su's vengeance is the wish fulfilment against it... The director Lee Chang-dong wanted to: "[...] discuss the ambiguities of the world we live in and how there seems to be no answer to the questions that we have today - especially for young people. I feel like young people these days have realized that there's something wrong in this world, but it's very difficult to figure out exactly what is causing the problems and what lies underneath." We are left not knowing. No resoluti

on just growing resentment...from a vengeance unfulfilled.... justice unattained. And it makes sense... If you asked a South Korean what these words evoke, they would probably refer to the concept of Han. Han is said to embedded inside the DNA of every South Korean, the word has no English equivalent, so I won't attempt to explain it with my own words, but I will leave you with a quote that does good job of describing it: "a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense o

f helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one's guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong-all these combined" Revenge in Korean cinema seems to be the manifestation of Han... A shared national wound, visible for everyone to see. Thank you for taking the time to watch our video. We invite you to like share and subscribe if you haven't done so yet. I was really struggling with

the Korean names for this video. I'm not exactly sure I pronounced them all correctly. Today's musical composition was made by Eduardo Gonzalez. If you liked his work, you can find his information in the description bellow. And also, if you want to contribute to our channel so we can keep making videos like this one, you can take a look at our Patreon page. Until next time.