Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Desperate to pay for his beloved sister's kidney operation, Ryu kidnaps his wealthy boss' daughter. Nothing goes according to plan, however, and what ought to have been easy money soon turns into blood money. That's just the start of this supremely gritty hardboiled thriller set in Asia's underground world of illegal organ transplants. After the kidnapping goes awry, Ryu and his girlfriend struggle to avoid Ryu's old boss, who's determined to take an eye for an eye. Director Chan-Wook Park says he wanted to create a hard-boiled Asian thriller that eschewed the overblown visual excess of recent Korean efforts in favor of a darker, more realistic delivery. As a result, everything here is saturated in the believable (and the bloody). Brutally nihilistic, this is without out a doubt one of the best films to come out of Korea.