Sympathy for Mr Vengeance sat in my collection of DVDs for a while. Fortunately, I freed up somet time to get round to watching it, and I’m very glad I did.
I could see what was happening. I didn’t check the length of the film, but it was slow. It was pacing itself, and I could sense that was the intention. Had I watched this when if I was tired, I probably would have fallen asleep, and that would be an injustice to such a great piece of work.
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a film that deceives you. It’s one that you endure to be rewarded. I say endure, but perhaps that is too heavy a term to use. The first half hour is slow in providing some idea of what is going on, but in hindsight provides a good backdrop for a film that starts slow and ends very harshly.
Ryu is a deaf and dumb mute who was supported by his sister to go to Art School, but unfortunately became sick, which meant Ryu had to quit studying and work himself. he works in a factory by day and takes care of his sick sister by night. Living as a deaf dumb mute, the people he meets treat him like a second rate person. Talking down to him rather than to him. He isn’t stupid, just unfortunate.
His sister requires treatment via a dialysis machine, and has got to the point where she requires a kidney transplant. When Ryu signs himself up as a kidney donor, he is informed that his blood type does not match that of his sisters. He can only live in hope that the right match will appear and save his sisters life, who doesn’t have that long to live.
If you intend to watch this film just for violence and gore, then avoid this as it is more plot and depression than out and out violent grotesqueness
By chance, while taking a piss in the lavatory, he comes across two guys who fly post labels offering illegal organs for sale. By now he has lost his job due to company cutbacks. The only money he has is whatever is left in his bank, of which he saved a lot in order to pay for the kidney transplant his sister requires.
Ryu decides to take the chance and visits the sharks out of desperation. 10 million Won would buy his sister a kidney, but at the expense of his own. He agrees and decides to go with the offer. He awakens to find a wound near his left kidney, poorly patched together and bleeding around the edges. Naked, with no clothes, he opens his eyes to an empty building. The organ sharks have disappeared with his 10 million Won, and his kidney, with him having nothing to show for it.
Back home, suffering, he visits the doctor who informs him they have found a kidney. He calls it a “miracle”, hoping Ryu would finally be pleased having waited so long. The kidney transplant would be carried out in five days, and would cost several million Won. Money which Ryu no longer has.
His girlfriend, a member of a revolutionary terrorist organisation, beats Ryu up having been told what he has done. She communicates with him through sign language and talking to him, since he can read lips if not hear. She suggests an idea, which Ryu is far from comfortable with, but she makes the valid point that he has no money, and his sister will probably have to wait until she is dead before another opportunity for a transplant arises. Ryu reluctantly agrees, and they both decide to kidnap his ex-boss’s daughter.
During their surveillance, they watch as another ex-worker mutilates his body in front of Mr Park (the boss) as his wife left him since he lost his job. Mr Park is not an evil man, but he does live a life of luxury in comparison. A reality which doesn’t hit him until later. The man cuts his body with a carpet knife, in front of Park’s daughter, his colleague and his colleague’s daughter. Ryu decides the kidnapping probably won’t work, and has no intention of confronting Park.
Another plan is devised to suggest to the daughter that they were asked by Park to look after her while he goes to see her mother in hospital, having been involved in a car crash. The same story is spun for Ryu’s sister, and the daughter is now in their possession. They look after her, while at the same time upsetting her in order to take pictures which demonstrate the threat of death and torture to Park’s daughter. The pictures, along with a ransom note are sent to Park with a request for 26 million Won – enough to cover the operation. The plan is to give back the daughter promptly, with a threat of murder should he call the police. Park obliges and follows the rules in order to get his daughter back.
Park is lead to a an empty shed in the middle of nowhere. Money in hand, he waits for his kidnappers to contact him. Ryu jumps Park from behind, binding him to a pole and covering his head with a hood. Returning home happy as punch, he plays momentarily with the daughter as she watches cartoons. She hands him a note, at which Ryu jumps up in panic. His sister had discovered that he had not been going to work, and that no money was coming in. He had lied to her for a while, and she decided to take her own life in response, to no longer be a burden to him.
The characters actually parallel with one another, and just as you start to feel empathy for one character, you feel the same for the other
He buries his sister in a remote area, near a small stream. Covering her cold body with stones. The girl cries in the back seat, upset at her death and her loss as they played together often. During the burial, a “special person” comes along, completely retarded who starts to remove the stones that Ryu is using to bury his sister. The retard is scared off by Ryu, while he kneels in front of his sister bawling his eyes out.
The girl is in the car, and is awakened when the “special person” tries to lift off her necklace, made by Ryu, with a branch. The spastic is scared off by the girl, who goes out in search of Ryu, who is burying his sister on the other side. Tragedy ensues, in the darkest way possible, and the spastic makes a reappearance in the sickest way imaginable. I couldn’t tell if the director was trying to be funny or just sick. It is both sick and funny, as you watch in awe at the second tragedy that befalls Ryu.
Park is informed of his daughters death, and revenge is on the agenda, paying a cop to investigate and locate those the perpetrated her death. Ryu too wants revenge for his sister, against the organ sharks and sets to find them. Thus we have two stories running parallel, both culminating in brutal, raw and bloody deaths. During the chase, several others die in an equally dark manner. Too call the deaths sadistic would not be too far from the truth, but at the same time it provides credence to the characters who have lost everything and will go all out to gain vengeance for their loss.
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a film that deceives you. It’s one that you endure to be rewarded
The deaths in Sympathy for Mr Vengeance are nothing short of dark. The violence is sporadic in the film, short and sharp, but when it occurs, the blood is plentiful but realistic. This isn’t the over the top, cartoon violence of something like Ichi the Killer. The violence here is more subdued and slower. It adds a realistic edge, and at times you wonder how violent it can get. The brutality escalates from persistent electrocution to repeated skull bashing with a baseball bat. It goes further, and gets harder, ending with a death which is perhaps intended as ironic.
You’re tricked into thinking it’s going to be soft-hearted tragedy, things might go wrong, but deep down it will have a happy ending. That is the deception. What it turns into is two films, the back story of the first hour and then the unrelenting, violence of two people that are out for a no holds barred revenge, at any cost. The characters actually parallel with one another, and just as you start to feel empathy for one character, you feel the same for the other. They are both, at the end, psychotics out for vengeance. The confrontation between the two supports this premise, with the only form of expression left to them is their anger by violent justice as they see it.
If you intend to watch this film just for violence and gore, then avoid this as it is more plot and depression than out and out violent grotesqueness. If you want a film with some clever direction and smart imagery and use of sound (the daughter’s body being cremated, or the silence interjected into the wailing) then this film may be for you. It is dark, it is depressing at times, but in some ways, it’s also quite fun. Make of that what you will.
Verdict: Bleak, morbid and well paced film with sparks of brutal violence. Recommended.