[Spoiler Alert: the climax of Lady Vengeance is discussed freely in the following article.]

"The violence, in a word, is meaningless," Park says. "But I think human beings attach to that kind of feeling. We all know that it is meaningless, but even so, people can concentrate on that theme. It is something fascinating."

Park has called Lady Vengeance the closing chapter in a "vengeance trilogy," and the movie deliberately recapitulates themes and scenarios from the previous installments (as well as reusing many of the same actors). The twist this time is that the vengeance-seeker is a woman, Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), who spends 13 years in prison for the murder and abduction of a small child, even though she played only a small and unwitting role in the crime. Upon her release, Geum-ja seeks revenge on the real murderer, played by Oldboy's Choi Min-sik. But as she gets closer to him, she begins to realize that he may be responsible for many other murders besides. Rather than pursuing her own agenda, Geum-ja eventually cedes the bloody job of administering justice to the victims' families, who line up in slickers, implements in hand, to extract their pounds of flesh. It's a startling image, not least because it acts as a wicked satire of the blood lust Park's trilogy has so often stirred up.

That the line of parents, each waiting his or her turn on a wooden bench, resembles a courtroom jury is no accident. "I grew up during the Korean military dictatorship," he recalls, "and during that time, individual rights were not necessarily protected by the government, or the justice system. If people want justice, they have to act for themselves. So subconsciously, maybe that came out."

Still, the movie offers little closure to the blood-soaked families, who throw an awkward celebration and vanish into the night. "These people, they had high expectations of revenge," Park says. "They think through the act of revenge they can solve their agony. But the act itself is absurd, and what's left afterwards is regret, and dissatisfaction. The act of revenge doesn't satisfy anything or solve anything. At the end, they cannot go back."

Although Geum-ja does claim a few victims along the way (mainly by way of establishing her bona fides behind bars), it's worth noting that she's the first of the trilogy's protagonists to turn away from violence in the end—and also the first to emerge relatively unscathed. "I think the difference between the male and female characters is not how they initiate revenge, but how they give it up," Park says. "In the film, Geum-ja gives up her own chance of revenge, and if it were a male character, that kind of concession would not happen. So it's softer and better to have a female character in that sense. She prepared her revenge for 13 years, but because she's female, not male, she eventually concedes the pleasure of revenge to other people."

In giving up her right of revenge, Geum-ja inadvertently finds a sort of grace, counseling her long-lost daughter to "live white." (In Park's initial conception of the film, preserved only on the Korean DVD, the color was leached slowly out of the film's second half, eventually becoming black and white.) "Since this is the last piece of my trilogy, I wanted to close with a kind of purification," Park says. "The main characters in the other films, they appear in this film—for me, it's like a big party to close everything up. These characters, these people, regardless of all the violence and defects, they made an attempt to purify their souls in one way or another."