3 ideas
Choi Hyun-soo, the newly arrived security chief at a rural Korean dam, drives drunk, hits an 11-year-old girl, and strangles her when she regains consciousness, then sinks her body in the reservoir. As the girl's father closes in on him, Hyun-soo opens the dam's floodgates and drowns the village downstream, killing many residents.
Social punishment does not stay with the guilty party. The public, the press, and people who carry grudges transfer it to the offender's family. Seo-won is expelled from schools and neighborhoods as each new place learns whose son he is, so he serves a sentence for an act he only witnessed. Collective memory of an atrocity attaches to a surname, and it can outlast any legal penalty.
The murdered girl's father, Oh Young-je, is himself a controlling, abusive man, and the girl was fleeing him on the night she died. His campaign of vengeance against Hyun-soo and later Seo-won is presented as another form of domination rather than justice. Read this way, the label 'victim' tells you where someone stands in one event. It says nothing about their moral character, and grief can serve as cover for cruelty that existed before the loss.