REVIEWED - LADY VENGEANCE/CHIN-JEOL-HAN GEUM-JA-SSI: THE concluding film in South Korean director Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy, Lady Vengeance is charged with the stylish virtuosity that marked out its predecessors, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Oldboy. Anyone familiar with Oldboy, in particular, and its deeply disturbing revelations, will know not to expect a comfortable, passive experience.

Lee Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae), is introduced as a notorious Seoul criminal jailed at the age of 18 for abducting and killing a young boy. The movie opens when she is released after serving 13 years as an apparently model prisoner. However, on leaving jail and being presented with tofu cake as a traditional symbol of her new, reformed life, Geum-ja flings it to the ground. She has other things on her mind: to reunite with her daughter, who has been adopted, and to settle the score that explains her status in the movie's title.

Park's intricately structured film incorporates dream imagery, fantasy sequences and flashbacks through which we get to know Geum-ja's cellmates, among them a bank robber whose husband manufactures a gun for Geum-ja; a North Korean spy who gives her the Diamond Sutra, a primer on achieving vengeance; and a sexually voracious lesbian imprisoned for murdering her husband and his mistress - and eating them.

There is even more daunting imagery ahead, as Geum-ja gets down to the movie's agenda of exacting sadistically protracted vengeance on the real villain of this challenging, distinctly unsettling and eerily compelling psychodrama. As its warped secrets are revealed, the movie reflects on the nature of revenge and its consequences for all concerned.

A TV star famed across Asia for her role as a wholesome cook in a popular soap opera, Lee Yeong-ae seizes upon the opportunities offered by her image-shattering, range-defining role. And the excellent Choi Min-sik, who was so persuasive as the edgy protagonist of Oldboy, turns up as one of cinema's most sinister creations in recent years.