Park Chan-wook, who has never won the Palme d’Or, now decides who does

Park Chan-wook

Photo: YantsImages / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1963 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance
Awards	Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival (Oldboy, 2003) · Jury Prize (ex aequo), Cannes Film Festival (Oldboy, 2004 · BAFTA · Best Director, Cannes Film Festival (Decision to Leave, 2022) · Jury President, Cannes Film Festival (2026)

The joke Park Chan-wook made at the Cannes closing press conference was too precise to be accidental. Asked about the competition, he said he had considered giving the Palme d’Or to none of the films in competition — because it was a prize he had been pursuing, in one form or another, since Oldboy sat there as a nominee more than two decades ago. The room laughed. Park did not explain the joke further.

The son of an architecture professor and a poet, he was born in Seoul in August 1963 and grew up in a household where formal thinking was ambient rather than imposed. At Sogang University he enrolled in the philosophy department, not the film school — a decision that shaped everything about how his movies reason on screen. The pivot came during his third year, when he sat through Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and understood that cinema could do what he had been hoping philosophy might: construct airtight arguments out of irrational material. He ran the school’s film club after that and let the original career plan dissolve.

His two earliest features, made in the 1990s and since largely disowned, went nowhere commercially or critically. He regards them with the detachment of a craftsman assessing defective early work. What they gave him was the knowledge that he could survive failure, which is not a small thing. Joint Security Area, released in 2000, changed the position entirely: the thriller set at the Korean demilitarized zone became the highest-grossing film in Korean history at the time and earned him the kind of institutional trust that allows a director to become genuinely strange.

He used that trust immediately. The three films that followed — Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance, now known collectively as the Vengeance Trilogy — argued, in escalating formal complexity, that revenge is the one human project guaranteed to leave everyone worse off. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance traces a chain of retaliatory violence where no one holds the moral high ground for more than a scene. Oldboy traps its protagonist in a mechanism where the act of vengeance and the object of it turn out to be the same thing. Lady Vengeance follows a woman whose meticulous, years-long plan for justice arrives at something indistinguishable from grief. Cannes gave Oldboy the Grand Prix in 2003. It was a recognition the film had earned on craft alone — it is one of cinema’s most precisely assembled narrative traps — and it introduced Park to an international audience that had not known what Korean cinema was constructing.

His work after the trilogy moved in directions that looked like departures but functioned as extensions of the same formal argument. Thirst, released in 2009, was a vampire film in which the horror resided less in bloodletting than in the impossibility of desire in any of its forms; it won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Stoker, his first English-language feature in 2013, was a Southern Gothic family thriller with Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska that divided critics on release and has found a sustained second life since.

The charge that gets regularly leveled at Park’s work is that he aestheticizes violence — that by making brutality formally beautiful, he endorses it. The charge gets the films exactly wrong. The formal elegance in his work, the precise framing and operatic scoring and choreographed cruelty, is precisely what makes the violence feel wrong rather than cathartic. He uses beauty the way a prosecutor uses exhibit evidence: not to endorse what he’s showing, but to make its consequences unavoidable for the viewer. The horror in Oldboy is not the twist, which is only a mechanical function; it is that the architecture of vengeance requires the protagonist to become the thing he spent fifteen years trying to punish.

The Handmaiden, released in 2016 and based on the Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith, transposed that logic into a con-game romance set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. It won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language and remains the most widely seen of his films internationally. Decision to Leave, which brought him the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2022, was a more compressed thriller — a detective who falls in love with the woman he suspects of murder — but the underlying argument was unchanged: that desire and punishment find each other eventually, without requiring orchestration.

No Other Choice, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2025, took the same instinct into darker comedy. Based on Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax, it follows a paper-industry engineer played by Lee Byung-hun who, having been abruptly laid off after twenty-five years, decides the most rational available solution to the job market is to eliminate his competitors. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, Lee Byung-hun earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, and the film was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film before being shut out of the final nominations.

In February 2026, Cannes announced that Park would serve as jury president for the festival’s 79th edition — the first South Korean to hold the position. His next film, The Brigands of Rattlecreek, is an American western with Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal, and Tang Wei, acquired by Warner Bros.’ Clockwork label and budgeted north of sixty million dollars, with production scheduled to begin in early 2027. The man who built his reputation on Korean revenge dramas is about to make a western. The genre is different. The questions underneath it are not.