Who do you feel more sympathy for?

Come on guys, if someone murdered your daughter for NO reason, (or so it would appear) you would do the same.

what I take from it is this: you have to feel sympathy for both of them because they know not what they do. Neither character is able to accept their guilt. Ryu should have left the organ dealers alone, but he rejected his own mistakes (which are an inherent aspect of the human condition) and projected them outward on to others, blaming the organ dealers for the loss of his sister.

Meanwhile, the father is unable to accept the loss of his daughter, unable to show emotion at her funeral, embodied by vengance. That is the sadness there -- he becomes inhuman, to the point of inhumanly murdering 3 people. The apparition of his daughter also blames him for not teaching her to swim, and in fact the daughter liked Ryu and had no hard feelings against him. It was simply an accident.

Thus, if Ryu had accepted the tragic death of his sister and gone on living his life, and if the father had accepted the tragic death of his daughter and done the same, the outcome would not have been as horrific. Indeed, the scene where Ryu locates and sets up the organ dealers to kill them is interwoven with the scene where Park locates Ryu's apartment and tells his source, "I will kill them."

The decision of each character to get vengeance on the other is their ultimate downfall. Psychologically, they each believe a fiction, an illusion that crashes back to the real. For Ryu, he believes killing them will fulfill his revenge fantasy but in fact it isn't enough, and he is left in a psychotic state, eating their kidneys as futile attempt to exact retribution, but it gives him no peace. In fact, he loses his girlfriend at precisely the same moment (and implicitly because of) his vengeance drive.

Park has a similar delusion, the fiction that killing his daughters killers will give him peace, when in fact it does not -- the phone ringing when he is in the car after killing Ryu accented and punctuated the horror of it, and he certainly does not feel a grim satisfaction from it (in fact he is simply cold, morbid and devoid of humanity -- he has dehumanized himself through his rejection, externalization and projection of guilt).

Both characters are so similar as to ask what the difference really is. I analyzed the film again last night, watching it for the second time, and one idea is that Ryu represents the id, or unconscious drives (see Zizek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" for an example of this). As Zizek points out, Freud said that drives are silent. Zizek compares the character of Harpo Marx to the id in its silent, impulsive, good natured but innocently evil sort of way. I'm not sure if this role completely fits with Ryu but it is one way to look at it. In that way, the character of Park would then be the ego -- self-centered, calculating, logical, intellectual. This would show that really both the ego and id are capable of horrors, though each in their own unique way. The ego is capable of unfeeling, rational and unspeakably cold acts of sadism such as when Park tortures Ryu's girlfriend to death. The id reacts in a more primal way, not using the refined and sophisticated electro-shock but rather a bludgeoning instrument, perhaps symbolic of its less refined, primal rage type drive.

This is just one reading of the film and I don't mean to say that Park Chan Wook intended this to be understood, it's just one explanation for the psychological behaviors and actions carried out by the characters, and perhaps one lesson we can learn from this film.

The question of who to feel sympathy for, I think we are supposed to feel sympathy for both of them. Ryu is certainly sympathetic in his naive, pure innocence and foolish gullibility. Park is sympathetic as the random victim of fate who loses his daughter. Both of them become unsympathetic as the film goes on, but even then, I believe Park Chan Wook is challenging us to feel sympathy for them.

Interestingly, Park Chan Wook wanted the film to start full color and gradually drain to black and white, a theme he successfully executed in Lady Vengeance but was unable to do for this film.

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