The Films of Park Chan-wook, Ranked
Ever transgressive and provocative, Park Chan-wook has a name synonymous with dark explorations of violence, twisted crime thrillers, and psychologically rich characterization. As a child of the 20th-century Korean New Wave, Park has been at the forefront of Korean cinema both back home and in the international eye, alongside fellow filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong. His 2000 debut feature, Joint Security Area, became the highest-grossing film in South Korean history. Since the turn of the century, he’s garnered a reputation as one of the most acclaimed filmmakers working today. He’s taken home the Grand Prix, Jury Prize, and Best Director awards from the Cannes Film Festival; has won dozens of prizes from other film award bodies; and he was awarded South Korea’s Eugwan Order of Cultural Merit. With his tenth film, No Other Choice, currently playing in theatres (one of my favourites of 2025), I’m ranking all of Park Chan-wook’s feature films.
Quick disclaimer: This list is missing two of Park Chan-wook’s films, The Moon Is . . . The Sun’s Dream (1992) and Trio (1997). The filmmaker has, by all accounts, disowned these first two efforts, considers 2000’s Joint Security Area to be his first real film, and has made active efforts to ensure these films cannot be seen. You can read all about that decision in this article.
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10. Stoker (2013)
Park’s only English-language film is far from his best moment as a filmmaker, but when we’re looking at the work of an artist of this calibre, it’s far from a poor film. The washed-out shots of the Tennessee landscapes are haunting, and the excellent performances from the main trio are excellent. However, the visual flourishes seem to be overcompensating for a rather lacklustre script (this is the only film in his filmography as a director that Park didn’t write or co-write). Written by Wentworth Miller (yes, the guy from Prison Break and The Flash), the film’s actual narrative struggles to go beyond a series of tropes and recycled cliches. Not to venture too far into spoilers about this decade-old movie, but the central mystery resolves to the most obvious and played-out solutions. About a third or halfway into the film, you can already guess how it’s going to end. It feels like a pastiche of the thrillers Park has built his career on, and self-parody is never a good look for a filmmaker. It’s a strange thing to notice during a Park film, even if he didn’t write the screenplay, because the rest of his filmography is so full of fun surprises and unpredictable narratives. Alas! One miss in ten movies ain’t too bad.
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9. I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)
“The vending machine says hi.”
There’s a significant jump in quality from Stoker to the joyous and endearing I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. The only rom-com to Park’s name (although not his only romance) is the most divergent outing in his career. In this very sweet and absurd tale, Cha Young-goon (played by Im Soo-jung) finds herself in a mental hospital after attempting to “recharge” herself with an electrical cable, which her family and medical professionals assumed to be a suicide attempt. What they don’t know is that Young-goon is actually a cyborg with the ability to talk to machines, or so she thinks, and needs that power to survive. She can’t live on human food, of course. In the mental hospital, she befriends and eventually falls in love with Park Il-soon (played by Korean pop star Rain), a kleptomaniac with a love for masks. The two set out with a simple task: find a way to remove sympathy from Young-goon’s system so that she can use awesome powers to enact revenge on her captors. With a lively sense of imagination and a deep level of care and empathy for its protagonists, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK never feels exploitative, nor cheap. It’s a remarkably touching and humanistic tale, despite Young-goon’s wishes to the contrary. While this film might not be the grand, violent epics that define Park’s career, this installment shouldn’t go overlooked either.
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8. Lady Vengeance (2005)
“You said living is a struggle, too. A struggle not to die.”
The third installment of Park’s thematically linked “Vengeance Trilogy” finds Lee Geum-ja (played by the incredible Lee Young-ae, in her second collaboration with Park) seeking revenge against the men who have hurt her. Thirteen years ago, Geum-ja was arrested and convicted for the murder of a five-year-old boy in a story that caught the attention of the nation thanks to Geum-ja’s beautiful appearance. But, as you will come to know well with Park’s filmmaking, her story isn’t as simple as it was made to seem by the police and the media. Geum-ja’s quest to clear her name takes her into the deepest parts of her past, including the sources of shame and pain that seem even more crushing than the crime for which she was convicted. While the ensemble becomes a little too large by the end, leading to Geum-ja’s story feeling somewhat overshadowed by the rest of the unfolding criminal odyssey, Park’s visual language and directorial mastery make it a compelling thriller nonetheless. Lady Vengeance’s slow desaturation as it nears its ending, eventually becoming purely black-and-white, is an impeccable touch.
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7. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
“The bad image kidnappers get is because of kids getting killed. But we’re different. Give us the money and we’ll return the kid pronto.”
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first of the “Vengeance Trilogy,” makes a visceral impression on the viewer. Always disturbing and, by the end, crushingly bleak, the film is a daunting exploration of cyclical violence, in which the ever-expanding web of darkness pulls the viewer further and further into the muck of depravity. Here, Ryu (played by Shin Ha-kyun), a deaf-mute factory worker, and his anarcho-communist girlfriend are out to get the money needed to support Ryu’s sister’s hospital bills by kidnapping the daughter of the factory’s president, Dong-jin (played by Song Kang-ho). Desperate retaliatory measures, the selling of organs, and plenty of murder follow swiftly thereafter. Park cuts through the bloody affair with a mean streak of macabre humour and a masterful use of dramatic irony, which punctures holes in what can be an overly serious and pitch-black story. But perhaps the film’s strongest choice is in how it refuses to morally judge any of its characters. There is no evil here, only increasingly desperate men and women doing whatever they have to keep themselves safe.
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6. Decision to Leave (2022)
“The moment you said you loved me, your love is over. The moment your love ends, my love begins.”
This movie was featured on my Best Films of 2022 list.
Decision to Leave plays out like a romantic variation of the cat-and-mouse narrative of Mann’s Heat, but shot with the beachy aesthetics of Altman’s The Long Goodbye, even if its camera is far more engaged and dynamic than that film’s rather static approach. One part romance and one part police procedural, the film is a brilliantly rendered two-hander about a police officer and the woman with two dead husbands and the fraught, distressing relationship between the two. The story unfolds not so much as a “whodunit” — as the guilty party in both of the film’s murder mysteries (it’s a two-for-one mystery special, with each case serving as half of the runtime) is almost immediately apparent — but as a “is-he-going-to-arrest-her-or-kiss-her?” The film uses its two-part structure as a thematic complement to the Confucian proverb at the centre of the film’s story. Despite being quite funny and featuring some insane editing choices, Decision to Leave is much more low-key than most of Park’s other films, making it the most accessible entry point to his filmography.
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5. No Other Choice (2025)
“Repeat after me: I am a good person.”
This movie was featured on my Best Films of 2025 list.
An adaptation of American author Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, No Other Choice is a delightfully concocted thriller about desperation in the modern economy and South Korea’s submission for the 2026 Academy Awards. Boy, does this thing ever sing, with its perfect mixture of Park’s usual calling cards, including its insane plotting, ever-present social commentary, and a razor-sharp script. The title phrase, “no other choice,” is repeated throughout the film under a variety of contexts. It’s first uttered by the new American owner of a Korean-based paper manufacturer to justify mass layoffs at the plant. Protagonist Yoo Man-su (played by Lee Byung-hun) utters it repeatedly as a mantra or manifestation to justify the extreme actions he takes to “level out” the competition in the job market. Later, a middle-class paper factory line manager says it when describing his own less-than-ethical decisions to climb the corporate ladder. The characters see themselves primarily as pawns of fate, despite the film not exactly agreeing that they have no agency in their own stories. There is a fascinating tension between these characters as victims of a horribly oppressive and desperate work, while also using violence as their primary language to get ahead. It’s fascinating — and wildly entertaining — stuff.
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4. Thirst (2009)
“But only by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
Pulling visual flourishes from both the inherent grotesque of religiosity and the unrelenting brutality of modern life (namely, fluorescent lighting), Thirst is Park’s most lurid and queasy film. Here, a Catholic priest (Song Kang-ho, his third time working with Park, stuns as the film’s tragic leading man) heads to Africa to participate in an experimental, and often lethal, treatment for a strange new disease. While the experiment seems to fail, a last-minute blood transfusion leads to a miraculous recovery. When he gets home, after accidentally attracting a rather large flock of parishioners who believe he has God-given powers to heal, the priest discovers that he’s developing a nasty penchant for drinking human blood. He also can’t stand the sun. Song plays up the tormented and haunted man of faith to perfection, while Kim Ok-vin plays an even more obsessed counterpart to the priest’s burgeoning desires of the flesh. The film’s visual language and screenplay perfectly handle the conflicting and complementary aesthetics of Catholicism and vampirism. The sound design here is maybe the creepiest, gnarliest part.
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3. Joint Security Area (2000)
“Come on. What’s wrong with people of the same blood getting together and playing some games? Is that such a crime?”
Eight gunshots, three witnesses, two dead soldiers, but no one will talk. What happened in that military outpost just north of the Korean border?
Since 1910, the Korean Peninsula has been under some form of military control or conflict. In the first half of the 20th century, it was annexed by the Empire of Japan, and, since 1945, has been divided along the 38th parallel into North and South Korea. Park’s Joint Security Area, named after the border-straddling negotiation rooms where diplomatic meetings between the North and South are held, enters into the Korean conflict with a deft sense of humanism and sympathy for the men stationed on either side of the DMZ. The film establishes its central mystery as an espionage drama about two South Korean soldiers found north of the border who might have killed two North Korean officers. But — as UN investigator Maj. Sophie Jean (played by Lee Young-ae) soon discovers — the truth makes the mystery far less thrilling and far more tragic. Park’s thrilling debut film, one of the most commercially successful Korean films of all time, reduces one of the greatest international tensions of the contemporary world and reduces it to a story of men who are too kind to each other for their own good.
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2. Oldboy (2003)
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.”
If Joint Security Area made Park a powerhouse in his own country, then Oldboy is the film that made him an icon internationally. In the twenty-three years since its initial screenings, the second chapter of the “Vengeance Trilogy” has gone on to be a legendary work of twenty-first century filmmaking, and no retrospective of the last two-and-a-half decades is really complete without it. A demented, postmodern, and fundamentally nihilistic update to both low-fi genre action movies and Greek tragedy (Oedipus Rex springs to mind), Oldboy is a nauseating, revolting, and utterly compelling piece of work. Everything here is a masterclass in movie storytelling, from shot composition and blocking to its dynamic editing and haunting score choices. And that’s not even to mention the plentiful dynamic performances, nuanced writing, and (I keep saying this in this article, but it’s never not true) oblivion-black humour. I don’t want to say too much about its intricately wound plot lest I give away one too many details. It’s one of those films so perfect in its craft that it’s almost impossible to adequately describe in a blog post. It’s a masterpiece in the truest sense of the word. It’s a modern classic. It’s a total cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk. And yet, it’s not quite my favourite of Park’s films . . .
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1. The Handmaiden (2016)
“Men are disgusting. How can they be so single-minded?”
Adapting the clockwork mechanics of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, but transporting that story’s 19th-century English setting to 1930s Korea, a nation under the colonial control of the Japanese, The Handmaiden is Park at his most exhilarating. An impoverished thief, Sook-hee (played by Kim Tae-ri), is hired by a prolific con artist to hoodwink a wealthy heiress to steal her uncle’s vast fortune. The cloak and dagger plot gives birth to a rich and poignant exploration of the male gaze, agency and bodily autonomy, exploitation, queer history, and the role of women in a patriarchal society. This is Park demonstrating both his most proficient craftsmanship (from the gorgeous period costuming to the highly textured cinematography) and his most heady (thanks to the endless conversation to mine from the aforementioned themes). Yet, the depth of the material never intrudes on what is fundamentally a thrilling and anxiety-inducing thriller. Concealed identities and switching allegiances (and some bizarre imagery) make this film rewarding both on a first-time watch and on many subsequent revisits. While I will thoroughly refrain from any plot details — as the element of surprise makes the first viewing so exciting — this has one of the more hopeful endings of Park’s oeuvre, making it a nice change of pace from a filmmaker who loves to explore the dregs of humanity. It doesn’t get much better than this.
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