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 (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 (2003) puts a bullet in his brain; in (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 (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
