When we learn about the life of Geum-ja there is no mention of the preacher, it seems as though she only met him after her release from prison.
Is the role of the preacher only a gimmick to move the plot along? Being an American viewer of a foreign movie though I was wondering if something was lost on me.
Or could it have been from the reputation she developed in prison of being an "Angel" that attracted his attention?
Not so much a gimmick, but simply the first indication that prison didn't "fix" her:
Lee Yeong-ae plays Geum-ja, a delicately beautiful young woman who 13 years previously astonished the nation by confessing to a horrendous crime: the kidnap and murder of a five-year-old child. She has been released from prison, now in her early 30s, and over this long time has amassed a new reputation: that of saintly conversion to Christianity. She is a veritable modern Magdalene whose purity surrounds her like an aura. But Geum-ja has a secret - a secret from the news media, from her fellow prisoners and from us, the audience. And the secret begins to unfold when an evangelical Christian group is coldly rebuffed when they greet her at the jail gates with a tambourine-rattling hymn.
Only later we learn the reality about her stay in prison, how she started planning her revenge and made allies.
