Lady Vengeance (18)

T-shirt manufacturers and poster printers take note: Park Chan-Wook is officially a star director. That doesn't mean that his films are all going to be hits, but it does mean that he's joined Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and the Coen brothers in the ranks of those cult auteurs whose every new offering is greeted by the rejoicing and fevered chatroom posting of their fans. They're the directors who always try to be smart, stylish, idiosyncratic and commercial, and the directors who seem to have passed more of their lives watching B-movies than they have talking to other human beings. From now on, expect Park's work to keep grabbing headlines at festivals, and to keep cropping up in magazines' Best Films Ever polls.

The Korean director's induction to this boys' club got under way with Oldboy. A Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2004, this hallucinatory, pitch-black tragicomedy gave audiences a guy in a black suit who administered unlicensed dental surgery on his enemies, stopping only to chomp his way through a live octopus. The fact that Oldboy was in a foreign language only enhanced its Tarantino-endorsed, arctic cool. Here was a film that could have been created explicitly to secure the allegiance of youngish, nerdish male DVD addicts.

As those addicts soon discovered, Oldboy was the second instalment in what Park is now calling a revenge trilogy. In 2002, there was Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, another gob-smacking thriller in which every single camera angle and wallpaper pattern took the viewer by surprise. Part three of the trilogy is Lady Vengeance, and while it has connections to both of the preceding films, it's related particularly closely to Sympathy For Mr Vengeance. It even repeats one of that film's lines: "There are good kidnappings and there are bad kidnappings." And, as in Mr Vengeance, the kidnapping in Lady Vengeance is a very bad one indeed.

The film opens with a woman in her early thirties being released from prison. A voice-over and a flurry of flashbacks tell us that she is Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), and that she was convicted 13 years beforehand of abducting and murdering a five-year-old boy. It wouldn't be fair of me to reveal what actually happened all those years ago, but suffice it to say that Geum-ja wasn't acting alone, and that she's spent her term behind bars preparing to get her own back on her partner in crime.

Demanding quite a bit of concentration from its viewers, Lady Vengeance hops to and fro in time, and in and out of fantasy sequences, as it shows what Lee Geum-ja got up to while she was in prison, and what she's getting up to now that she's out. In the jail segments - as dark as they are mordantly hilarious - she devotes herself to making friends and influencing people. Whether she's donating a kidney or cutting the prison's Ms Big down to size, she does whatever it takes to win the loyalty of her fellow inmates, with Lee Young-ae wickedly caricaturing a stereotypically smiling, servile Oriental woman all the while. But once she's served her time, she reinvents herself as an emotionless, stiletto-heeled angel of death, recruiting her erstwhile cellmates to help her realise her vengeful dreams. Violent reprisal is not enough. Accompanied by a stately harpsichord, Geum-ja is obsessed by fashioning her retribution into a baroque work of art.

It's an obsession that mirrors the director's own meticulous approach to movie-making. In a ravishing film that's more heightened and stylised even than Oldboy, every surface is colour-coded, every edit is an exercise in teasing elision, and every shot is doing something different from the last. If Park is going to include a church's glee-club band, he'll have them dressed in Santa Claus costumes. If he's going to introduce a new character, that character will enter the frame hidden behind the stack of crates he's carrying. And if a child is going to look at a globe, why not make it a three-feet high, inflatable one? Lady Vengeance is designed and storyboarded with such minute attention to detail that, with its spookily helpful, beautiful heroine, it's not just the thinking viewer's Kill Bill; it's Amélie, except with more severed fingers.

Two-thirds of the way through, though, Park eases off. The colour palette is toned down from stark scarlet and black to grubby browns and greys; the action, having bounced between countries and time periods, settles on one location, and one steady pace. All of a sudden, Lee Geum-ja's quest is no longer a fabulous scheme with its own aesthetic. It's a wearisome job that's full of bickering over methods and money.

This final act is even more gripping and gory than what's gone before, but the abrupt gear change has annoyed some previewers, and I can see why. If the first two thirds of Lady Vengeance race through so much material that they're almost too fast to follow, the last third can seem frustratingly drawn-out in comparison. But Park knows what he's doing. He finishes his trilogy by conceding that, in the real world, loose ends are more likely to fray than to be tied up, and that evil deeds sometimes have humdrum motives. Having started Lady Vengeance as an homage to the kind of crazily complicated payback plot seen in Oldboy, he ends it by shaking his head at such fantasies. It's an audacious, virtuoso film. And while it may not be as satisfying on a first viewing as Oldboy was, there's an obvious solution. See it twice.

n.barber@independent.co.uk

Jonathan Romney is away