Park Chan-wook

With Decision to Leave (2022), which earned him the Prix de la mise en scène at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, the South Korean director experienced a renaissance within the noir genre, crafting a subdued thriller far removed from the extremes that had made him famous in the early 2000s.
A leading figure of the so-called Hallyu, the South Korean cultural wave that swept across the globe between the 1990s and 2000s, the director first established his reputation with the celebrated “Vengeance Trilogy” – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005). These works conveyed a starkly manichean vision of the world, typical of much contemporary South Korean cinema, where extreme violence emerged as the only outlet against both physical and psychological oppression. In these films, violence spirals exponentially, producing paradoxical situations that push beyond all limits: a man imprisoned for fifteen years in a single room as punishment for a past deed stands as a shocking act of cruelty never before seen on screen. Even bloodier is Cut, Park’s segment in the anthology film Three… Extremes (2004), presented at the 61st Venice International Film Festival in the Midnight section, which contains a striking reference to The Man from the South, an episode from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With Thirst (2009) and the Hollywood production Stoker (2013), the director offered his own distinctive take on the gothic vampire genre.