🇰🇷 Park Chan-wook

He was born in Seoul on August 23, 1963, into a comfortable middle-class family with no industry connections. He studied philosophy at Sogang University, an unusually Catholic institution that would seep, in oblique theological form, into nearly all his later work. He had wanted, at one point, to be an art critic; he ended up at the magazine Roadshow as a film critic, which he was for most of the late 1980s.

His first two features — The Moon Is the Sun's Dream (1992) and Trio (1997) — were polite, conventional, and failed quietly. He has spoken often of the years that followed as a period of near financial ruin. The pivot came in 2000 with Joint Security Area, a tense, beautifully constructed thriller about a North–South border incident that became, on release, the highest-grossing Korean film in history and gave him the only thing he had ever truly needed, which was complete creative freedom.

He used it to make Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the first installment of what would eventually become the Vengeance Trilogy. Then Oldboy (2003), based on the Japanese manga, in which a man imprisoned for fifteen years for no reason he can identify is released and given five days to find out why. Then Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), a colder, more austere closer to the trilogy. The three films, taken together, are now the foundational case study taught at half the world's film schools.

Thirst (2009), a vampire-priest melodrama starring Song Kang-ho, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Stoker (2013), his first English-language film, made with Wentworth Miller's script and Nicole Kidman in a supporting role, was a stylish minor curio. The Handmaiden (2016), an adaptation of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith transposed to Japanese-occupied Korea, restored him fully — a film whose lush, formally precise eroticism made it both a popular hit and a critical landmark, and which earned the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.

Decision to Leave (2022), a slow-burn detective melodrama about a married policeman and the widow he is investigating, won Park his Best Director prize at Cannes and confirmed a striking late-career turn toward restraint. The violence is gone. The hammers are gone. What remains is the same patient, almost cruel attention to faces and the way men and women fail at communicating — which has, on closer inspection, been the only subject of his films all along.

He produced and co-wrote, in 2024, Park Hoon-jung's Uprising, and developed and showran the HBO espionage limited series The Sympathizer (2024), based on the Pulitzer-winning Viet Thanh Nguyen novel, with Robert Downey Jr. and Hoa Xuande. The show split critics but confirmed Park's slow migration toward longer forms, in much the same way as his colleague Bong has done.

He lives in Seoul with his wife and one daughter. He is, by reputation, the gentlest man in Korean cinema — meticulous on set, soft-spoken in interviews, almost incapable of saying anything unkind in print. The contrast with his films has been remarked on so often that it is now a tradition. The hammers, the corsets, the octopi — all of them, you come to understand, came from somewhere very still.