The daughter


I'm really struggling to put together how this was actually his daughter and how her character never mentions anything about her past.

She meets this man who has been missing for 20 years (exactly how long her father has been gone) and she engages on this quest to help him find his daughter. Never once does she mention how her parents disappeared 20 years ago?? This just doesn't make much sense to me. How does she not know the name "Joe Doucet"??

Not only that, but the entire plot that puts the 2 of them together is so incredibly far fetched. How does our villain know that his master plan of getting Joe to bang his own daughter is going to work? What if he's so psychologically *beep* after 20 years of torture that he won't reach out to her? Or what if he's such a weirdo that she keeps her distance and writes him off? Or what if she simply doesn't want to jump into bed with a lunatic who is twice her age? Or what if the baddies at Sam L's place end up killing him? Wouldn't his whole evil plan have been for nothing?

Ridiculous writing for the villain's plan, that's for sure.

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I don't think she knew the true history of her past at all or she thought both of her parents were dead if she knew she was adopted. Keep in mind too that all the news coverage you saw after the killing initially happened was on the fake news show, so he wasn't the "household name" that was implied.

But as for the rest of the plan coming together I agree.

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I haven't seen the remake (nor do I plan to), but in the original it was explained that she had been manipulated and hypnotized since she was adopted at three.

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Yep and Dae-su was hypnotized as well. Park Chan-wook said on the commentary that she probably wouldn't have fallen for him if it wasn't for the hypnosis.

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This is where the original is just so much smarter, the bad guy basically hypnotizes them so they forget who each other are and it essentially makes them fall in love, wheres in the remake it is indeed very far fetched for him to just run into her in the park and then sleep with her where the bad guy supposedly had a camera set up ready for it. The whole relationship felt so forced in this one.

"A man chooses. A slave obeys."

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Maybe she didn't know her adoptive parent weren't the real ones?

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Or what if those football players never managed to delay Joe and Joe could get a hold of the woman with the yellow umbrella before she gave the umbrella to the homeless man and led Joe to his daughter?
Marie obviously got a thing for Joe or she wouldn't be so eager to take care of him - the villain manipulated her to do that - but why wouldn't she run as far away as possible from Joe after she got almost raped because of his company?

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It takes suspension of disbelief, but she was manipulated throughout her entire life to be hungry for a strong male father-figure in her life.

I haven't watched it again, but I think Adrian talked about getting her a nurturing adoptive dad who died early on.

As for the umbrella, that couldn't have been the only way they were prepared to link up Joe and Marie. They'd have kept setting them up until they met, and then let her need for a strong male figure to take over.

As for why she didn't run after getting assaulted, she was committed to him by that point, both to his cause and romantically. It's also important to remember that the assault was NOT part of Adrian's plan, anyway. It was a coin toss whether it'd spoil everything or not.

Besides, even if Marie ran, Adrian would probably find ways to get them back together. Maybe he arranges for her to get into trouble and let Joe "save" her.

Or his whole plan just goes bust. That had to be a risk. Adrian was nuts, he'd take that risk.

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More absurd yet is the assumption that Joe Doucet can somehow attack the detention facility single-handedly and more or less defeat all the defenders he fights against. I don't think Joe's systematic discovery of the detention facility by going through 1001 Chinese restaurants was planned by the Stranger, yet he didn't do anything to prevent him from going on what surely should have looked like a suicide mission. He just showed up at the end to get him medical care.

I think the narrative would have been a little stronger if the Joe-attacks-the-detention-facility had been subverted by the Stranger.

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