At the festival this year, you can watch a terrified five-year-old hang from a noose in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Reluctantly, I agreed to give this a second chance, as there’s no resisting Park’s fiendish talent for shot design, amplified to baroque heights on the big, big screen. And if you’ve ever seen a Lee Young-ae movie, then there’s immense fun to be had in watching her apply more eye shadow than a Times Square hooker, or cheering as she unloads two rounds of her designer handgun in between the toes of a child-murdering bastard.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to exploit the reversal in gender is mostly squandered here (the mother-daughter scenario is lifted straight from Kill Bill), with the exception of her score to settle being very much a feminine revenge: in her preparations, everything has to be “pretty”, from her blow-wave hairstyle, to the high heels on her feet, to the commissioned ornamental hand-piece on her gun, to the liberal application of makeup. Even when she emerges from prison after 13 years, she’s the breezy image of a covergirl, donning Elizabeth Taylor sunglasses, and wearing the same polka dot dress that became all the rage after her arrest made headline news in the spectre of Olivia Hussey.

Surrounded by patisserie sweets, ice flakes, and purified tofu, it’s all fucking gorgeous to look at, but resembles something more akin to a snow globe – you shake it, it snows, it looks nice, but then what? In her case, a selfish act of vengeance becomes a support group experience after discovering that not one, but four children were killed. The families of the deceased are rounded up, forced to watch home movies of their child’s kidnapping and death (easily the film’s most grueling sequence), before being asked to pick a number, a weapon, and take turns at butchering a bound and gagged Choi Min-shik until dead. It’s all incredibly absurd, and hard not to chuckle at – a brief moment of perverse relief following the devastating recap of child murders, not to mention a welcome reminder of Park’s knack for pitch black humour in the most unlikely of situations. The impossibly bleak Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance – oddly, the best entry in the revenge trilogy – can be singled out as the instigator of this darkly comedic streak. Look hard enough, beneath the cruelty and acts of desperation, and it’s there, particularly in the rubber-faced Bae Doona who plays the film’s memorable anarchist-terrorist girlfriend.

Equally unhinged in former Incredible Film Festival favourite Barking Dogs Never Bite, Bae channels the same mopey flat-chested loner routine of that movie into the drab high school corridors of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s infectious Linda Linda Linda. Recruited as lead vocalist by a fractured all-girl rock band three days out from the school’s annual Rock festival, her flummoxed Korean-out-of-water schtick never wears thin, with strains of broken Japanese and gawky physical comedy the source of much humour. Make no mistake: Bae is the Silly Putty of Korean Cinema (for me, she outplays My Sassy Girl’s Jun Ji-hyun), either hunched over, stone-faced, lank-legged, or writhing around like a puppet on strings to one of The Blue Hearts’ contagious punk 80s hits. A convicted scene stealer, she is no less than embraced in this thoroughly Japanese film, a sharp footnote on the country’s current obsession with all things K. Yamashita’s previous festival outing was the deadpan nugget No One’s Ark, an absolute gem of sly abrasive cuts and vacant stares into oblivion. Contrary to belief, this is far from a step backwards for Yamashita, smuggling his comic timing for editing and holding shots shrewdly into feel-good convention. And it’s feel-good alright, though not hemmed perfectly either as Yamashita leaves threads dangling, from unformed romantic crushes, to girlfriend feuds on the mend, to beautiful friendships in the making, to pauses that never end. It’s frayed, and all the better for it.—Tim Wong