Park Chan-Wook has built a career from crafting gripping thrillers that play with audience expectations. Best known internationally for Oldboy and its devastating reveals, Park by that point had already achieved success domestically in South Korea with a few other thrillers. Including the precursor to Oldboy in his Vengeance Trilogy – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.
A dark thriller in a similar vein as many early Coen brothers movies, the film follows a deaf man’s attempts to pay for a kidney for his dying sister through an ill-conceived kidnapping. Things go awry, and many people suffer. Brutal and devastating, it set the template that Oldboy and Lady Vengeance would complete.
A standout element to Mr. Vengeance is the way it trusts its audience and skips the boring parts – a lesson that many writers can use to help freshen up their script.
The Parts Between the Boring Bits
We’ve been making movies for over a hundred years now. Audiences have seen a lot in that time. They’ve become familiar with the rhythms of different kinds of stories. Even if they haven’t spent time studying films and screenwriting, they still know the beats of a rom-com, or a horror movie, or a thriller. They have expectations based on genre and tone for how certain scenes will play out. And if you don’t surprise them and just deliver exactly that, you’re making a movie they’ll forget as soon as the credits finish.
Park’s solution to this problem? Skip all the bits the audience already knows. Now part of this likely comes from just how much story the movie has to cover. It makes several pivots throughout with regards to PoV character and objective – not surprising for anyone familiar with Park’s oeuvre. But this choice also gives the film a little extra punch of unpredictability as it keeps showing how you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
The Expected Beats
In one instance early in the movie, our protagonist Ryu and his girlfriend Yeong-mi scope out their initial target for kidnapping – who happens to be the child of Ryu’s former boss. But they quickly realize that if they do go for the girl, Ryu will be the prime suspect because of his being fired by the man. They wonder what they should do now —
And then immediately the film cuts to the two of them in possession of the girl’s friend, the daughter of another wealthy engineer. The film skips multiple scenes that other, more traditional thrillers would cover – the characters debating kidnapping the other girl, putting together a plan, executing the plan, the father discovering the daughter has been kidnapped. Instead it expects you to put the pieces together and catch-up, because the movie has more story to tell.
As we discussed, an audience could see each of those beats coming and, because it’s only 30 minutes into the film, safely expect they take the girl. So Park doesn’t bother with any of it. The important details – the lies they’ve told to cover up the kidnapping, the contours of their plan – we pick up from context as they execute the rest of their scheme. Park trusts, and even demands, that the audience is smart enough to assemble the story themselves.
The Take-away
Two immediate benefits come from trusting the audience like this. To start, it makes us feel respected. Here’s a script that won’t waste our time. But it also makes us lean in. Instead of sitting back and letting our familiarity fill in the gaps when we only half-pay attention, we must track all the details to make sure we’re keeping pace with the story.
But you must have firm command of your craft and storytelling structure to do something like this. It requires great control to know exactly what you can skip over and what still needs to be included. But if you can pull it off it’ll add an unpredictable edge to your script that will grab the reader’s attention.