Park Chan-wook studies how vengeance and obsession can narrow the mind, reducing problems to a single, violent answer.
The Korean director returns to characters consumed by the promise of moral clarity. Park is perhaps best known for his exacting compositions and stories hooked onto moral dilemmas. In these bewildering stories, he tightens around an obsessive point of view. The tighter the point of view becomes, the more brutality starts to read as logic. These films use genre as a pressure chamber, from the operatic revenge of Oldboy (2003) to the erotic thrills of The Handmaiden (2016) to the romantic fatalism of Decision to Leave (2022).
On Christmas Day, Park's latest film No Other Choice (2025) hits theaters around the United States, ahead of a wider release in January 2026. The film, shown at film festivals from Venice to New York, centers on an increasingly pervasive anxiety: unemployment.
When a veteran paper-industry employee is abruptly laid off during a corporate takeover, he spirals into a desperate attempt to reenter the field and reclaim his standing at home. After rejection follows rejection, he arrives at a chilling conclusion: the only way to distinguish himself is to kill his competition. But unlike many of Park's violent protagonists, he is squeamish and hesitant, driven to murder not by cruelty but by the tediousness of the job market and the fear of economic erasure.
Born in Seoul in 1963, Park thought he might be a painter, inspired by his father -- an architect -- and his brother --an artist. Discouraged by his lack of technical skill, he turned to criticism, joining the Department of Philosophy at Sogang University in hopes of becoming an art critic. One well-worn anecdote is that Park watched Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) in college and decided to pursue filmmaking, as The New York Times confirmed in 2017.
At first, Park wrote film criticism. But soon after, he dove headfirst into filmmaking, completing his The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream in 1992, a love triangle unfolding inside the Korean mafia's criminal underworld. This film -- and his second feature, Trio (1997), about three listless people connecting by desperation -- received little to no critical or (financial) attention. Yet, there's no question that they laid the groundwork for his career, one defined by the same moral precarity.
In 2000, Park delivered his first smash hit with Joint Security Area, propelling him from industry outsider to national figure. Before long, he founded Moho Film, a production company that gave him creative control. What really put him -- and Korean cinema -- on the map is the "Vengeance Trilogy," comprising Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005). The second installment took home the Grand Prix at Cannes.
Violence, for Park, channels the intensity of very human emotions. These films resonate with audiences because the director probes relatable anger and anxiety and pushes them to extremes.
"My violence is not like those in action films, where the fight sequences are beautiful and choreographed, or like those at the end of a revenge sequence with the villain, where it's cathartic," Park told BOMB in 2006. "My violence comes from the aggressor and the aggressee both being pained because of the violence to and from each other. I want this pain and sadness to be felt by my audience."
For this edition of Playback, I'm rolling back the tape on Park's filmography, a body of work that weaponizes provocation to expose the uneasy ethics beneath revenge and desire.
Joint Security Area (2000)
Set against the supposedly immovable border of the DMZ, Joint Security Area (2000) exposes how fragile nationalism becomes once human intimacy slips through the cracks.
The film opens when two North Korean soldiers are killed inside the DMZ. Swiss Army Major Sophie E. Jean (Lee Young-ae) is dispatched to impose order on a story no one wants fully told. Her investigation peels back layers of official narrative to reveal a forbidden friendship whose real crime isn't violence, but closeness.
Park considers Joint Security Area his directorial debut, disowning his first two movies. Its release marked an inflection point in the filmmaker's career and laid the groundwork for his morally ambiguous films. Admittedly, he's right -- this is the perfect starting point.
Oldboy (2003)
What begins as a revenge fantasy in Oldboy (2003) curdles into a sadistic experiment, forcing its hero -- and its audience -- to confront how badly we want punishment to feel righteous.
After a night of heavy drinking, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) wakes up inside a sealed hotel room. The Korean businessman finds himself inexplicably imprisoned by an unknown captive, and for 15 years, that's where he stays, growing more and more deranged, particularly after finding that he's been blamed for his wife's murder.
When he is abruptly released back into the world, he begins hunting for both his captor and the reason for his imprisonment. He forms a fragile bond with Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), a sushi chef who brings him home after he faints. At the same time, his tormentor contacts him with a deadline -- five days to uncover the truth. The pursuit to find the captor and his daughter soon reveals its purpose: not escape or justice, but a final stage of punishment designed to dismantle his sense of self as completely as the years of confinement.
This is perhaps one of the most disturbing movies within Park's oeuvre. Oldboy, the heart of Park's "Vengeance Trilogy," won the Grand Prix at Cannes, the moment he catapulted to real stardom. It is often cited as one of the best films of all time -- far from an overstatement, because anyone who watches it is sure to remember the twist.
Lady Vengeance (2005)
Lady Vengeance (2005) stages revenge as a rehearsed performance, where rage is refined into discipline.
The "Lady Vengeance" in question is Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), who spent 13 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a five-year-old boy. But, during her incarceration, she cultivates an image of saintly kindness, an affect designed to conceal the meticulous revenge she is assembling.
As a teenager, Geum-ja became pregnant and turned to her schoolteacher, Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), for help. Rather than provide refuge, he exploits her vulnerability, coercing her into assisting with his crimes and ultimately framing her for a murder she did not commit. It's a maddening betrayal, a signature of Park's repertoire.
The final installment of Park's "Vengeance Trilogy" offers yet another meditation on the place of violence in human emotions. This revenge tale is composed, shedding the frenetic fury of Oldboy. Here, we see a carefully thought-out moral decision in which the masses -- those hurt by one man -- punish pure evil. And, more than anything, they (and the audience) feel empowered to exact this justice.
The Handmaiden (2016)
Seduction is never just seduction in The Handmaiden (2016). Intimacy is a vehicle for misdirection and strategy.
Set in 1930s Korea during the Japanese occupation, the film follows Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a pickpocket hired to pose as a maid to Lady Hideko, a wealthy Japanese heiress played by Kim Min-hee, as part of an elaborate plot to steal her fortune and commit her to an asylum. As the plan unfolds, loyalties fracture and expose a world where every relationship is provisional. Park structures the film around shifting paradigms of power and desire until the original con implodes, revealing something harsher in its place. Too much information might steal away some of the enjoyment for a first-time viewer.
This film is widely regarded as Park's best since Oldboy. Unlike much of his earlier work, The Handmaiden turns away from punishment and toward moral escape, examining how deception and desire can become tools of liberation. It is a quieter meditation on agency, in which survival depends less on endurance than on choosing when -- and with whom -- to break free.
No Other Choice (2025)
The title No Other Choice (2025) is repeated throughout Park's film like a mantra. It functions as an excuse and a release from accountability. This fatalistic refrain frames life-altering decisions as inevitable rather than as choices. Park exposes how, under capitalism, this logic seeps into everyday thinking, convincing people that systems are immutable and responsibility endlessly deferable.
Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) hears these words early on in the film. We meet the veteran employee of Solar Paper, a papermaking company, embraced by his family in front of his idyllic home. This romantic vision of middle-class life collapses when an American firm acquires his company and announces mass layoffs -- Man-su among them. The stability he took for granted evaporates overnight.
One by one, the material comforts he once provided for his family begin to disappear. His wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), meets the situation with firm practicality, never wavering in her commitment to him -- she reminds him more than once how he fell in love with a single mother (a testament of true love, not status). The Netflix subscription is the first to go, to the dismay of his adopted son, Si-one (Kim Woo Seung), and soon even the house is on the chopping block -- the home he grew up in and later managed to buy back. Even the dogs, Si-Two and Ri-Two, must go live with his in-laws. The only thing they budget for is cello lessons for their prodigal daughter, Ri-One (Choi So Yul).
Pushed to the limit, Man-su becomes increasingly desperate as he tries to wiggle his way back into the paper industry, increasingly cutthroat as the job market worsens. On paper, he is an ideal candidate: experienced, personable, and even with awards under his belt. But there are still other candidates -- and a person in the role he wants (Park Hee-soon).
Man-su is continuously denied or ignored, cast aside by the industry he dedicated his life to. If the system rewards only those who remain visible, then he will make himself impossible to overlook. In this brutal economic landscape, he decides there is only one way to compete: by meeting violence with violence -- eliminating the man in the job he wants, and then the others standing in his path. For him, there is no other choice.
No Other Choice meets the moment. Park's incisive thriller taps into the growing anxiety of obsolescence in a society where jobs vanish, never to be seen again. The fear of being replaceable is persistent -- and even maddening. Like many of his films, this moral dilemma is one treading murky waters, where the seed of violence sprouts from familiar -- and relatable -- anxiety. At what point does systemic pressure turn desperation into a rational response?