On the career of Park Chan-wook and whether his Vengeance Trilogy coheres.

Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance are bound together as a trilogy by their subject matter but differ enough in tone and formal approach that the trilogy designation slightly misleads.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the most formally unusual: it follows two parallel revenge plots with a clinical evenness that refuses to privilege either character's perspective or suffering. The film is cold in a way that the other two are not, and its coldness is the correct response to its content.

Oldboy is the most audacious: a film that constructs its plot backward from its ending, which means that the final act revelation is built into the film's structure from the first scene even as the audience is led to believe they are watching a forward-moving narrative.

Lady Vengeance is the most beautiful and the most interested in the relationship between justice and community: a woman who was wrongly imprisoned organizes a group act of vengeance that the film frames as a form of collective grief.

What connects them is Park's formal position: he makes films about revenge from a perspective that is not anti-revenge but is precisely aware of what revenge costs and what it fails to achieve.