A new wave from the East

A young deaf-and-dumb man with green hair awakes naked on the concrete floor of a car park. There is a livid wound on his back where he has had a kidney surgically removed. This is just one of the many startling images that season this intriguing film - two parts thriller, one part social critique.

Chan-Wook Park's wild ride through the tale of two men whose lives intersect through kidnapping, organ-smuggling and sacrifice is one of South Korean cinema's more impressive achievements to date. Rooted in reality, rather than the fantastical heightened style of much of Hong Kong and Asian cinema, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance's retributive plot is played out against the well-delineated background of the city of Seoul.

Ryu (Ha-Kyun Shin) is having a bad week. His attempt to donate one of his kidneys to his sick sister is thwarted by the fact that his is not a match, he loses his job with a meagre 10 million won (£4,400) pay-off and he gets mixed up with a black-market trader in human organs.

In desperation he takes his girlfriend Youngmi's advice and kidnaps a rich man's daughter for money to buy a kidney for his sister; when the child drowns accidentally the grief-stricken father comes looking for him.

By contemporary Western standards the plot is sufficiently bizarre to hold one's attention, though the shifting focus from one male lead to the other is slightly confusing. But the real triumph of this film is the background and the political context.

Youngmi (Doona Bae) is a freewheeling punk and a political pamphleteer who advocates a return to communism. " Movement of capital minimises the value of money," she expostulates to passers-by, while justifying the abduction to Ryu as a "good" kidnapping as opposed to a "bad" kidnapping.

Strange jokes and visual humour lurk in the interstices of the picture, such as the image of the deaf Ryu as the only one without ear-protectors in the noisy factory. The sight of a quartet of masturbating boys who have mistaken Ryu's dying sister's screams of agony for sexual ecstasy in the next door apartment disturbs as much as it amuses.

A film that questions the moral choices that people are forced to make and then examines the consequences while conducting itself with the momentum of a street level thriller? Keep an eye on South Korea. It could provide the next wave from the East.

Neil Norman

Sympathy For Mr Vengeance
Cert: 18