How Park Chan-wook Disrupts Religiosity in Korea through Verticality
How Park Chan-wook Disrupts Religiosity in Korea through Verticality in Decision to Leave and Oldboy
This essay examines how Park Chan-wook uses verticality, a cinematic element of movement between high and low spaces, to explore and critique religiosity in Korea. Through the analysis of his films, Oldboy and Decision to Leave, it is found that Park Chan-wook deliberately inverts traditional symbolic meanings of height associated with spiritual authority, heaven, and hell. Like in Oldboy, the reversal of moral hierarchies through vertical height shows contradictions in Catholic ideas of guilt and redemption. Whereas in Decision to Leave, repositioning spatial relationships between natural highs and lows, like the mountains and the sea, disrupts Buddhist values of karma and rebirth. As a result of careful analysis and research, this essay therefore suggests that the use of verticality is a tool for questioning the relevance of external religious traditions in Korean culture and cinematic contexts.