Lady Vengeance (2005)
Vengeance is no simple business, as anyone who’s ever sat through a Park Chan-wook film with their fingernails dug into the armrest can attest. If “Oldboy” is a primal scream—rampant violence, delirious Freudian nightmares, crimson-drenched corridors—“Lady Vengeance” is the hush that follows, the cruelty made coldly mathematical, the retribution so artfully calculated you can taste the copper in your mouth. In his trilogy’s closing chapter, Park trades in the electric fury of testosterone for something subtler and, paradoxically, more lacerating: the slow-burn agony of the wronged woman forced to knit her own soul back together from the unravelled threads of innocence lost.