South Korean director Park Chan-wook has bent the imaginations of many with his aesthetics of extreme violence. But beyond the tongue cutting and neck biting is his sympathetic and humanistic take of our nature
It was as quiet as the grave in the main hall of Hong Kong’s M+ museum when Park Chan-wook strode in for his film masterclass in December last year—a very deliberate metaphor when it comes to the award-winning South Korean director best known for his canon of brutally violent cinema.
Park’s rare visit to Hong Kong was to promote his latest feature film Decision to Leave (2022), which took six years to shoot. Fans, museum staff and the media were curious to see what new and twisted method he would employ to sentence his characters to death after three decades of bewildering imaginations—the antagonist in Oldboy (2003) puts a bullet in his brain; in Lady Vengeance (2005), a child murderer is mutilated by the victims’ families who queue up one by one with knives and scissors, wearing raincoats to avoid blood spills; in Thirst (2009), a male vampire locks a human whose wife he has turned into a vampire in a cabinet pinned to the bottom of a frozen lake, then sacrifices himself and his female counterpart to the sun.
So it is a little surprising to see—spoiler alert—less of his signature cutthroat violence in the conclusion to his latest film, which won Park the best director award at Cannes Film Festival in 2022. We watch as a murder suspect, played by Lust, Caution Chinese actress Tang Wei, digs herself a grave at the beach, lies in it, and allows herself to be consumed by the rising tide. The detective who was investigating her husbands’ homicides (yes, plural), and has fallen in love with her follows her to the beach, bypassing her burial spot as he calls out her name, the audience painfully aware of her fate beneath the waves.
Read more: ‘Lust, Caution’ actress Tang Wei in Hong Kong to launch ‘Decision to Leave Storyboard Book’
It’s hard to imagine these twisted ideas of love and death coming from the soft-spoken, silver-haired director, who was brought up in an educated, devout Catholic middle-class household. His father was an architecture professor and amateur painter who would take the young Park to photography exhibitions. His mother loved going to the movies and was a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan. “Knowingly or not, I got influenced,” says Park of his parents’ influence, particularly that of his mother. “We used to watch old movies on weekends. It was a great pleasure for me. The films we liked were different: [Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation of the classic Daphne du Maurier novel] Rebecca (1940), which is told from a middled-aged woman’s perspective, was my mum’s favourite. I preferred [the 1958 release] Vertigo.”
As he grew older, he became a fan of Hong Kong movies. “Today, the world [is obsessed with K-pop bands like] BTS and Blackpink; but Hong Kong films stars were loved by [South] Korean people in the past. They were much bigger than Korean stars in the movie world,” he says. “I still remember films in the 1980s and 1990s golden era. I enjoyed To Kei-fung’s triad films, John Woo’s [1986 film] A Better Tomorrow and Wong Kar-wai’s [1990 release] Days of Being Wild. In [1987’s] A Chinese Ghost Story, [Taiwanese actor] Joey Wong was considered a goddess by Koreans.”