Given its sharp, intricate setup, the film’s subsequent straightforwardness is disappointing.
In the end, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.
Park Sang-yeon’s film is both selectively brutal and outrageously sentimental.
The film is essentially a giallo fanboy’s interpretation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, maybe even George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun.
The film is a daisy wheel of revenge-fueled gore speciously intercut with delusions of social commentary.