Leaves you with a taste for more. Or maybe that's just blood.

Rating: 9/10 (6 January 2014)

Oldboy is an artfully-done thriller, mixing slickness with directorial lyricism and more than touch of brutality to create a mesmerizing film about revenge, destiny, and closure. Ostensibly, this is another film tackling familiar themes with the predictable sameness. But thanks to the trio of writers' willingness to incorporate twists into the story, director Park Chan-wook mastering elements of intrigue and unsettling fright, and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung's beautifully seamy visuals, the film is one to behold, absorb, and contemplate.
The story revolves around Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), a businessman who is kidnapped the night of his daughter's birthday party in 1988 and trapped in a room that mirrors the likes of a hotel room. His only contact with the outside world is a Television, where he learns of his wife's murder and that he is a prime suspect. Dae-su doesn't know, however, that this room will be his home for the next fifteen years. To pass the time, Dae-su practices boxing, plots revenge against his killers, pens a will of sorts, and attempts to escape by tunneling through the brick wall.
In 2003, he is inexplicably drugged and released in the middle of a grassy field, trapped inside a suitcase, with no explanation of why he was held captive, who held him captive, and why he was randomly released. Dae-su, who no longer has a family or relatives, does the only thing he can do - wander around the streets of South Korea. Soon after his release, he meets a female sushi chef Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), a gentle, vulnerable woman who feels sorry for Dae-su and his circumstances. The two begin a relationship, despite Dae-su's questionable mental health state, and both try to find the people that imprisoned him for fifteen years.
Park Chan-wook doesn't make us sympathize or even side with Dae-su in any particular way. His camera simply remains on him, allowing us to think of him as a victim or someone who potentially deserved this imprisonment. Regardless, we want to know right off the bat why this is happening because the idea is baffling on many levels. But even with a solid mystery at hand, Chan-wook throws in revenge and romance elements, making Oldboy a pretty complete package in terms of juggling multiple, difficult genres, especially when they all need to work together to create an entire film. Chan-wook devotes enough attention to each element of the story, emphasizing on intrigue and devaluing the unnecessary, and with Chung's cinematography working to elevate the look and tone of the picture, Oldboy is nothing shy of immersing on a story and visual level.
There are issues I take with the story, however. To begin with, we don't get to experience enough of the agony Dae-su does when he's locked in the room for fifteen years. A good chunk of the film (say, maybe thirty minutes or so) should've been devoted to the monotony and hell of living inside a random place, being beaten, repeatedly drugged, and manipulated for no clear reason. Instead, only about fifteen minutes are spent inside that hotel-room and we see fifteen years skate by in montage. Another issue is, by the end, specifically during the final confrontation, the scene includes laughable dialog and one particular instance I simply cannot accept, even considering how desperate the lead character is.
Despite the issues, the inevitable intrigue and mystery set forth by the story itself make the film worth seeing simply on those merits. Thrillers come and go, especially ones that boast nothing more than star-power and droning action sequences. Oldboy, on the contrary, lingers in your system, and since its release in 2003, sent shockwaves around the world, introducing people to Korean cinema more so than any other film from the country. The film is brash, thoughtful, and pleasantly excessive, and leaves one with an appetite for more of the same material. Or maybe that's just blood.
Starring: Choi Min-sik, Kang Hye-jung, and Yoo Ji-tae. Directed by: Park Chan-wook.