Final Rating: 2/5
In 2004, at the Cannes Film Festival, a filmmaker became a festival sensation. Despite not winning the Palme d’Or, the most prestigious award of the event and of all of the circuit, Oldboy by Park Chan-wook became a classic. The film is the second installment of the Vengeance Trilogy, following Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and preceding Lady Vengeance.
Oldboy became a hit in the United States, championed by Quentin Tarantino, who was the President of the jury that year. Each new Park Chan-wook release would garner attention from audiences, festival programmers, film critics, and buyers. Despite almost thirty-five years into his career, the Korean master has only shot twelve films in his filmography.
In September 2025, the world praised the new work by the director, whose last film, Decision to Leave, had received an outstanding reaction from the critics. After that, came The Sympatizer, an HBO original show based on the book by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which received a tepid reaction.
No Other Choice, the return to film from the director, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, gathered fans and press to praise, despite not winning an award at the event’s competition, and failing to get any Oscar Nominations. However, the film brought attention back to the past works by the director, those before the global spotlight received by his success with the Vengeance Trilogy.
In this sense, the success of the new project, released by NEON in the United States, and by MUBI in the other regions, allows distributors to release their unknown projects, such as Trio, his sophomore feature, originally released in 1997.
Following his debut feature, The Moon Is… the Sun’s Dream, released in 1992, Trio was released five years later and already shows a few of the typical interests that Park would exhibit throughout his career.
The film tells the story of three individuals who battle with their inner demons. Ahn (Lee Kyung-young) is a saxophonist who catches his wife cheating on him, and wishes to commit suicide. Mun (Kim Min-Jong) is an intelligent man with violent impulses. Maria (Jung Sun-Kyung) is a single mother who wants to become a nun. The three of them, as the title suggests, unite to find Maria’s missing child, while they face violent acts and the reckless actions of each one of them.
As previously mentioned, the film shares the filmmaker’s interest in violence and the notions of irrationality. Similar to the characters in The Handmaiden, No Other Choice, and Oldboy, this film has a thin line between their actions, mostly the violent ones, and the loss of rational ideas.
Ahn is completely suicidal; apathetic about the idea of living due to the infidelity of his wife, who cheated on him while their daughter was at home. His first impulse is to set the house on fire, a scene that features comedy that can be found in other moments by the director, such as in Decision to Leave. The usual tropes of the filmmaker are here: the efficient geographical notion of the action sequences and the impressive shots, such as one where the camera follows a bullet that opens up a hand.
Yet, Trio fails to utilize the formal abilities of the director, even though they were not as polished as they are right now, to tell a story about three broken individuals who commit crimes around South Korea. The result is a film unsure what it wants to be: a found family or an action thriller. It is a proof of the maturing process that Park Chan-wook had as a filmmaker, improving in the next projects, reaching the success level that positioned him as one of the most well-known directors internationally.
Thank you to Film Movement and Foundry Communications for the screener.
