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GET BACK: Lee Yeong-ae as Lady Vengeance's angel of retribution.

As anyone who's seen the trilogy's previous installments, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, can vouch, Park delights in staging mind-bending quadruple-cross revenge scenarios (or, at least, his protagonists do, which amounts to the same thing). In Mr. Vengeance, a man takes revenge for the drowning death of his son by binding his killer, marching him into waist-deep water and slitting his Achilles tendons; in Oldboy, the villain imprisons his nemesis for 15 years, long enough so that the man's daughter may grow old enough for him to unwittingly fall in love with her. Lady Vengeance's protagonist, Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae), who has just spent 13 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit, has her own convoluted plan to avenge herself on the man who forced her to take the fall. But, as she cautions the gunsmith she's hired to fashion a custom-made firearm for use in her plot, "It has to be pretty. Everything should be pretty."

Geum-ja's specification might be Park's motto. Every frame of Lady Vengeance is immaculately designed and lit, each camera movement purposeful. (Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, who has labeled Park an incompetent, might need to consider refreshing his criteria.) In fact, the problem Park's films pose is that they're too pretty, especially given their purposefully ugly subject matter. It's hard to accept a movie where a prison bully is slowly poisoned with bleach, a small dog is shot in the head and we come within a split-second cut of seeing a small child hung by the neck, and yet every shot exudes cold-blooded control. The director starts to seem like an absentee parent, one who has left us in the company of a particularly sadistic and unstable babysitter.

As Park's protagonists go, Geum-ja is particularly gelid. With none of the animal passion of Oldboy's Choi Min-sik (who reappears here in a different, more bloodcurdling role), Lee projects a dead-eyed precision. Even more than her 13-year revenge plan, sketched out on the pages of a Buddhist sutra, she is her own greatest creation. In prison, Geum-ja apparently fakes a conversion to Christianity in order to win the support of a missionary preacher. But when, on the day of her release, he offers her a white tofu cake as the symbol of her sinless new life, she throws it to the ground. Later, she will speak eloquently of the importance of atonement, but first, she has some serious sinning to do.

The more relevant skill Geum-ja learns behind bars turns out to be confectionery; all that messing about with powdered chocolate and frosting rosettes is good practice for her labyrinthine machinations. (In case you haven't noticed thus far, I'm dancing around the details of the movie's plot, both because it would be unfair to reveal them and because explaining it in any detail would take all day.) Every one of the inmates who shares Geum-ja's prison cell turns out to have a role to play (laid out by interlocking flashbacks that contribute to the overall disorientation) and when Geum-ja finally corners her prey, she winds up sharing the burden, or the pleasure, of retribution with an unexpected set of fellow victims. Where vengeance in the trilogy's previous films is a matter of individual obsession, in Lady Vengeance, it is ineluctably collective. By the time the ultimate object of Geum-ja's wrath has been captured and readied for the slaughter, her plan has expanded to resemble a lacerating parody of organized justice, as aggrieved parties wait their turn with knives and axes in hand. One even removes her suede boots so as not to get them bloody. The film's final third is the most contained and controlled sequence in the trilogy, and a welcome respite from Park's ostentatious interweavings.

With Lady Vengeance, Park claims he has exhausted his lust for retribution, and the movie does steer the trilogy toward some kind of catharsis. Rather than once again allowing blood lust to destroy his characters, Park finds a way for Geum-ja to escape with her body and psyche intact, although the movie's final scene suggests she has a lot of atonement to do before she can indeed "live white." Park himself would do well to pursue the same course. His contribution to last year's anthology Three… Extremes rehashed his purportedly exhausted theme to self-parodic effect, demonstrating that whether or not his appetite for vengeance is consumed, his ideas on the subject surely are.

Lady Vengeance

Directed by Park Chanwook A Tartan release Opens Friday at Ritz Five