With only three feature films and two shorts under his belt, Korean director Park Chan-Wook has become one of the world’s most important filmmakers. His first feature, 2001’s “Joint Security Area” was an enormous hit in Korea and is already considered a modern classic. His third film, “Old Boy,” another huge hit, won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes in 2004, though it was edged out of the top slot by Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 9/11.”

Although Mr. Park is unknown in America, that’s changing with the upcoming theatrical releases of “Old Boy” and “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” – his second, and best, movie. “Old Boy,” which opens in the city March 25, received a sneak peek yesterday at BAM. Over the next few days, BAM will also show his other three other movies – “Joint Security Area” (screening March 6), “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (March 5), and a segment from the omnibus human-rights flick “If You Were Me” (March 4).

If you decide to take all his movies in at once, make sure you use the buddy system. Mr. Park makes movies that matter, and watching them feels like getting punched in the chest. You may need a hug between screenings.

“Joint Security Area” is the least traumatic place to start. Set in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, it concerns a United Nations investigation into an incident that has left a group of North and South Korean soldiers alternately wounded and dead.

The heart of the movie is an extended flashback showing how this pile of bloody bodies had its origin in the best of intentions: two bored South Korean soldiers sneaking across the border to hang out with two equally bored North Korean soldiers. No other movie introduces audiences so swiftly to the dehumanizing reality of the relationship between the two Koreas.

This is heavy stuff for a director whose life was changed by a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which turned him from a philosophy student into a director. Like Hitchcock, Mr. Park has as his constant collaborator his wife: Every scene in his movies, every piece of music, every bit of dialogue is submitted for her approval, and he praises her storytelling instincts. Mr. Park describes her as “just an ordinary housewife”; you’ll wonder just how ordinary she could be when you see “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.”

A commercial bomb, “Sympathy” is almost unwatchably painful, a harrowing descent into hell that starts when a deaf-mute factory worker kidnaps his boss’s daughter to raise money for a kidney transplant for his dying sister. This sounds like the plot of a bad television movie, but Mr. Park presents every single character sympathetically, which makes the third act’s barrage of electrocutions, drownings, smashed skulls, and stabbings feel like an unstoppable nightmare. It will give you a lifelong aversion to the concept of revenge.

Revenge, however, is the fuel that drives Mr. Park’s most acclaimed film, “Old Boy” – a sort of “Frankenstein” crossed with “The Count of Monte Cristo.” A middle-aged salary man – astoundingly played by stage actor Choi Min-Shik – is kidnapped and imprisoned in a tiny room. Fifteen years later, now transformed into a half-crazed hate machine, he’s released and tries to track down his mysterious captor.

Punctuated by chest-tightening action and the consumption of a live octopus, “Old Boy” is so intense that the first hour has passed before you remember to take a breath. The ending is a bit of a letdown, reminiscent of scenes in comic books where the bad guy explains the plot to the trapped hero, but the final twists are just sick enough to keep you fascinated.

For “If You Were Me,” the Human Rights Commission invited six directors to make short films about Korea’s oppressed minorities. Most directors in the film shoot for the moon but fall short, employing devices like sci-fi plots and footage of actual surgery. The most restrained episode is, surprisingly, Mr. Park’s.

A black-and-white short, it tells the true story of a Nepalese worker living in Korea whose minimal command of Korean gets her arrested. The cops don’t recognize that she’s speaking an actual language and assume that she’s insane. She winds up in a mental hospital for five years before teaching herself enough Korean to explain her situation to a nurse.

Evenhanded but incredibly powerful, this short is so much better than the rest of the movie that one feels slightly embarrassed for the other directors.

Mr. Park’s films may not seem as fresh or intense in 20 or 30 years. And he may not continue to make such splendid ones. But for the here and now, they’re among the best we’ve got.

Until March 7 (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4129).