Sympathy For Mr Vengeance
Korea’s booming film industry caters to a local taste for high-octane action, guns, gore and an unambivalent moral message. This ultra-violent revenge drama scores on all of the above, bar the latter. The central character is a deaf mute who’s sacked from his factory job then robbed of his severance pay. In order to pay for a kidney transplant for his dying sister, he kidnaps the daughter of his boss. When the child is accidentally drowned, her grieving father looks for revenge. At once grittily realistic and elegantly stylised, it’s a stylistically muddled film, but it successfully emphasises the bleak emotional state beneath the violence. Wendy Ide 30 May 03

Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, on release 30 May 03.