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The futility of revenge is a common theme in South Korean cinema, but it’s never been rendered more kinetically – or violently – than in Kim Jee-woon’s nightmarish thriller. (And if you’ve seen any of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, you know that’s saying something.) An intelligence agent, devastated by the brutal murder of his pregnant wife, goes rogue in the search for the killer, ensuring he doesn’t get off with something so easy as prison. To call it ‘gruesome’ is an understatement, but it’s beautiful, too: a ballet of blood to rival anything in the Nicolas Winding Refn playbook.

After breaking through with the gripping psychological horror story A Tale of Two Sisters, Kim Jee-woon turned his eye for balletic violence toward the action-thriller genre with this John Woo homage. A hitman (Lee Byung-hun) is ordered to keep an eye on his boss’s mistress and execute her if it turns out she’s cheating on him. When he refuses to do the job, the crime lord turns his aggression toward him. A simple setup, but the ensuing shootouts are expertly orchestrated, but Byung-hun’s portrayal of a killer with a conscience is remarkably soulful.

A precursor, in some ways, to the genre-blurring style he’d later employ in Parasite, B**g Joon-ho’s fourth film is perhaps his strangest, a mash-up of psychological drama, black comedy and murder mystery, with an elderly matriarch at its centre. Kim Hye-ja plays the titular unnamed single mother who attempts to clear her mentally disabled son’s name after he’s accused of killing a young girl. It sounds relatively straightforward, but the odd tone and plot twists mark it as an utterly individual work from a director incapable of doing anything boilerplate.