Who's in It: Lee Young-ae, Choi Min-sik, Go Su-hee, Oh Dal-su, Kim Shi-hoo
The Basics: She killed a child — or did she? — and went to prison for it. Now she's out and seeking the man who not only set her up, but also is responsible for the deaths of other children too.
What's the Deal? In most American films about vigilante justice (not counting last year's incredible A History of Violence), it's all pretty simple: Bad people must be eliminated if they threaten your family. But in Park Chanwook's movies (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), revenge is about the torment of the vengeful. In other words, Harrison Ford wouldn't be caught dead in this.
No Tongues Cut Off, No Sea Creatures Eaten Alive: It's a slower, less frenzied, less bloody movie than either Oldboy or Sympathy. (This is film No. 3 in the trilogy, and yes, a tongue is sliced off and a mini-octopus is consumed whole by the protagonist in Oldboy, and you see every gag-inducing second of it.) But it's just as wrenching.
Pay Attention: This is the kind of movie film critics politely call narratively "demanding." That means you have to follow a lot of little threads that eventually string together to make one almost-sense-making story. Every shot means something, every detail is part of the whole and every person the heroine encounters along the way is part of the momentum.
Lotsa Laffs: That's the other thing. It's very funny. No, not the child-murder parts. The other parts, particularly the flashbacks to Miss Vengeance's time in women's prison, where she was called "kind-hearted" even as she meted out justice to evildoers in her own sweetly homicidal way.