What you get for your entertainment dollar in "Lady Vengeance" is Korean director Chan-wook Park's brilliantly orchestrated story of how Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae ) got her groove back. She is Lady V., in red high heels and red eye shadow, a girl so pretty and delicate you'd never think that 13 years ago she abducted and murdered a child. A story of redemption? Yes, of sorts.

We flash into and out of Geum-ja's mind as she goes about her life upon release from jail. Soon enough she has moved back to Seoul, put on the red eye shadow, gotten a job in a pastry shop, seduced the owner's son because she needs a slave and gone about assembling her team. Her team is made of her cellmates these past 13 years; they help her put her plan for vengefulness in operation.

What plan? Well, you have probably guessed by now that Geum-ja didn't murder that child 13 years ago but was maneuvered into taking the fall for the man who did. The price of the extortion was monstrous. And, it turns out, this killer has killed again and again, while the idiotic police, so pleased to have Geum-ja locked up, don't notice or really care.

But she knows who he is, and she plans very, very carefully.

If "Lady Vengeance" is just a slick cheap thrill, it also boasts extraordinary performances and unusually skillful, eerily beautiful production. Lee is superb in a role that demands innocence one second, pain the next and fury still the next, all of it guided by iron courage and resolution.

-- Stephen Hunter

Contains extremely vivid violence, some of it directed at children. In Korean with subtitles.