MASTER OF THE DARK

South Korean director Park Chan-wook has bent the imaginations of many with his aesthetics of extreme violence. But beyond the tongue cutting and neck biting is his sympathetic and humanistic take on our nature

- Zabrina Lo

It was as quiet as the grave in the main hall of Hong Kong's M+ museum when Park Chan-wook strode in for his film masterclass in December last year-a very deliberate metaphor when it comes to the award-winning South Korean director best known for his canon of brutally violent cinema.

Park's rare visit to Hong Kong was to promote his latest feature film Decision to Leave (2022), which is his first release in six years. Fans, museum staff and the media were curious to see what new and twisted method he would employ to sentence his characters to death after three decades of bewildering imaginations-the antagonist in Oldboy (2003) puts a bullet in his brain; in Lady Vengeance (2005), a child murderer is mutilated by the victims' families who queue up one by one with knives and scissors, wearing raincoats to avoid blood splatter; in Thirst (2009), a male vampire locks a human whose wife he has turned into a vampire in a cabinet pinned to the bottom of a frozen lake, then sacrifices himself and his female counterpart to the sun.

So it is a little surprising to see-spoiler alert-less of his signature cut-throat violence in the conclusion to his latest film, which won Park the best director award at Cannes Film Festival in 2022. We watch as a murder suspect, played by Lust, Caution Chinese actress Tang Wei, digs herself a grave at the beach, lies in it, and allows herself to be consumed by the rising tide. The detective who was investigating her husbands' homicides (yes, plural), and has fallen in love with her follows her to the beach, bypassing her burial spot as he calls out her name, the audience painfully aware of her fate beneath the waves.