Revenge is a dish best served bleurgh in this seriously squishy, borderline-emetic Korean revenge thriller. It focuses on a deaf-mute man's attempts to procure a kidney for his ailing sister - only for organ swaps, kidnappings, rapes, electrocutions, drownings, spurting arteries and, yes, rivers of shit to muddy things.
Director Park Chan-Wook's take on such atrocities is part farcical, part poker-faced, pitching the film intriguingly between absurdism and horror. But his slow-burn study of ill justice, set against a backdrop of social inequality, is cheapened by its gloating excess. It's an astonishing symphony of suffering that lacks all sympathy, and while it doesn't soft-pedal its brutalities, it doesn't exactly substantiate them either.
