JP Nunez
Of all the films in Park Chan-wook’s famed Vengeance Trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance might be the hardest nut to crack. See, even though I (and many others) think it’s a classic, not everyone agrees. The movie only has a 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, and one of the big issues critics have with it is its apparently excessive and gratuitous violence. Many people think it’s just violence for violence’s sake, so they don’t see any point to this grimly pessimistic story.
And to be frank, I get it. If you compare Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance with the other two entries in the Vengeance Trilogy, its message is a bit harder to discern. It doesn’t have a shocking last-minute twist like Oldboy, and its main character doesn’t renounce his quest for revenge like in Lady Vengeance. Instead, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence right up until the very last scene, so on the surface, it can be tough to grasp what (if anything!) this dour tale is trying to say.
However, I don’t think it’s impossible. The way I see it, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has a very strong message, and it’s right in line with the other two films in this trilogy. We just need to pay close attention to a few key details, and when we do, the meaning behind all this bloodshed will become clear as day.
The Basic Plot of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
To begin, let’s go over the basic plot of the movie so we can get our bearings. When Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance starts, we follow a deaf man named Ryu, a factory worker whose ailing sister is in need of a kidney transplant. Unfortunately, he’s not a match, so he turns to a group of black market organ dealers for help. They agree to provide a matching kidney if he gives them all his money and lets them take one of his own kidneys in return, but after the operation, they leave him high and dry. It was all a con, so Ryu is left with no money and no kidney for his sister.
Soon afterwards, Ryu learns that his sister’s doctor has found a legitimate donor, but he’s now unable to pay for the procedure. In his anguish, he and his girlfriend, Yeong-mi, hatch a plan to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy businessman named Park Dong-jin, and they’re going to demand a ransom. At first, everything works out pretty smoothly, but when Ryu’s sister discovers what her brother has done, it all goes south. She decides she doesn’t want to be a burden anymore, so she kills herself and leaves a note for Ryu to find.
After he reads it, he takes his sister’s body to a riverbed and plans to bury her, and he also brings the businessman’s daughter along. However, in his grief, he doesn’t pay attention to the girl, so she accidentally drowns. From there, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance shifts its focus primarily to Dong-jin, as he hires a private investigator to find the person who killed his daughter.
But despite that change in emphasis, the movie doesn’t leave Ryu behind completely. He and Yeong-mi track down the organ dealers who stole his kidney, so he goes to their headquarters and kills them. Around the same time, Dong-jin finds out where Yeong-mi lives, and he enters her home and murders her. Then, Dong-jin also manages to kill Ryu, and at the very end of the film, Yeong-mi’s anarchist associates track him down and kill him too.
Divided Loyalties
When you lay out the plot that way, it’s not hard to see why some people have a problem with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. On its surface, this movie is just a string of misfortune and violence, so it does seem pretty mean-spirited. However, like I said before, if we pay close attention, we’ll see that there is in fact a message behind all this madness.
First, let’s take a look at our initial protagonist, Ryu. The film focuses on him for about the first half of its runtime, so we get to spend enough time with him that we never really view him as a villain. Sure, Ryu does some terrible things, but he’s not a bad person at heart. He simply wants to get his sister the medical care she needs, and he only lets Dong-jin’s daughter drown because he’s so lost in his grief.
It’s just a tragic situation all around, so we can’t help but feel for the poor guy. We even find ourselves rooting for him, so when Dong-jin goes after him in the second half of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, we don’t want him to die. However, by the time we get to that final confrontation between these two characters, our loyalties are also a bit divided.
Since the second half of the movie focuses more on Dong-jin, he quickly supplants Ryu as the protagonist of the story, so we start to sympathize with him as well. We see just how hard the loss of his daughter has hit him, and we feel a bit of that pain ourselves. So once again, we can’t help but root for him too, and a part of us wants him to get his revenge.
But since that would mean killing Ryu, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance leaves us feeling conflicted. When these two protagonists finally meet head to head, whose side should we be on? There’s no good answer here, and this dilemma allows us to see revenge for the heinous evil it truly is. Sure, we may want Dong-jin to quench his thirst for vengeance, but no matter how much we sympathize with him, killing someone we care about is simply not acceptable.
Parallel Acts of Vengeance
Next, let’s consider the dynamic between Ryu and the black market organ dealers who stole his kidney and his money. When Ryu finally tracks them down and kills them, our first instinct is to pump our fists in joy. All we know about these criminals is that they’re scumbags who take advantage of people in desperate situations, so we have no reason to wish anything but suffering and death on them.
However, if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, we’ll start to feel a bit differently. See, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance sets up a very clear parallel between Ryu and Dong-jin. They’re both part-time protagonists out for revenge, so it’s just about impossible not to compare them and their quests for vengeance.
And if there’s any doubt about whether we should, a pivotal moment in the story seals the deal for us. There’s a scene where Yeong-mi is on the phone with the black market organ dealers (because Ryu, being deaf, can’t talk to them), and Dong-jin is on the phone with the private investigator he hired.
The camera switches back and forth between these two simultaneous conversations, and at one point, they even seem to blend into one. Dong-jin’s private investigator tells him, “What I really want to ask is,” but he doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Instead, the camera immediately switches to Yeong-mi, and we see her ask her boyfriend, “What are you going to do to the bastard when you find him?”. But again, we don’t see what comes next. The camera instantly switches back to Dong-jin, and he simply says, “Kill him.”
It’s a beautifully edited scene, and the seamless convergence of those final few lines sets up a clear equivalence between Dong-jin and Ryu’s intended acts of vengeance. They’re morally on par with each other, so either they’re both justified or neither one is. There’s no middle ground here.
And once we understand that, we can see that Ryu’s murder of the black market organ dealers is far from the glorious triumph we might’ve thought it was at first. Rather, since Dong-jin is wrong to take revenge on Ryu, Ryu must also be wrong to take vengeance on these criminals. Revenge is revenge, and by the standards of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, it’s always wrong.
An Endless Cycle
Last but not least, we have to look at how Yeong-mi fits into all of this. So far, I’ve kept her mostly out of the discussion, and that’s been intentional. I wanted to save her for this last section because her role in the story adds a unique twist to the movie’s message.
Remember, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ends with Yeong-mi’s anarchist associates tracking Dong-jin down and killing him, and despite what some viewers may think, this is more than just a gratuitous coda. It’s the next step in a brutal cycle of misery and violence. All of Ryu and Dong-jin’s problems start when a group of black market organ dealers scam a man who’s down on his luck, and from there, things just get worse and worse.
Not only does Ryu eventually find and kill the people who conned him, but he also takes a really desperate measure to scrounge up the money he needs for his sister’s kidney transplant. That in turn leads to a young girl’s death, so the girl’s father decides to take revenge on the people who let her die. And last of all, Dong-jin himself is killed by the associates of one of his victims.
It’s a never-ending cycle, and even though Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance doesn’t show us what happens next, it’s not tough to imagine this cycle continuing long after the credits begin to roll. For example, maybe one of Dong-jin’s friends or relatives goes after the people who killed him, and maybe the anarchists go after this person as well, and so on and so forth.
But however the story continues, the point is that violence and evil just breed more of the same, and vengeance plays an integral role in keeping this gruesome cycle spinning. Without it, only one person in this film would’ve died, but instead, the body count keeps piling higher and higher until the very end.
And the way I see it, this is the ultimate message of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The movie doesn’t just force us to acknowledge that revenge is wrong. It also highlights an important reason why it’s wrong. Revenge simply perpetuates cycles of violence and misery, so if we want to make the world a better place, we have to root out the pursuit of vengeance and end those cycles as quickly as possible.
