brilliant, imaginative tragedy

Rating: 10/10 (6 February 2005)

"Oldboy" is the type of movie that defies expectations. It manages to stay surprising, wildly imaginative, original, thought-provoking and terrifying throughout its entire runtime. It's told in a style so weird, yet fluid (almost dreamlike, or nightmare-like) that you can neither tear your eyes away from the screen nor summarize the movie by listing the plot points. It's horrifying, brutal and cruel, but it has a very sure sense of where it wants to go and what it wants to be. It isn't arbitrary.
"Oldboy" begins like an extreme-cinema torture film and blooms into full Shakespearean tragedy. Chan-wook Park takes age-old themes of revenge, fate and individual suffering (sometimes digging past Shakespeare, all the way to the Greeks) and resurrects them with such an assured visual and story-telling style that "Oldboy" becomes a one-of-a-kind type of film. The colors, the transitions, the pacing, the visual tricks and conceits are so rich, that once I started watching the film I found it hard to pause or stop.
And, while the film is primarily about vengeance, it's hardly about it they way we are generally used to films being about vengeance. It's not "Kill Bill." The violence in it is not cartoonish, nor playful. The style I'd almost call experimental, rather than playful even though Park utilizes everything from CGI to split-screen to different film speeds, color saturations, etc.
The film also has a twist ending which I will not reveal. I will, however, say that I think it works incredibly well. Like the best of end twists, it doesn't seek to simply shock or surprise, but layer the already-told story with strata of meanings, shed new light upon it. Thus, even if you see it coming, it shouldn't prevent you from enjoying the film.
What is the film about? Essentially it's a story of a man who, for an undisclosed reason, winds up a prisoner in an apartment for 15 years, occasionally gassed, hypnotized, drawing his knowledge about the world from a TV. He studies martial arts, attempts suicide several times, writes journals, contemplates, tries to escape.
When he is released (a little less than halfway through the movie I'd say) is when the real hell begins. And the drama on which the film so deeply focuses, the drama between him, his re-discovered world and his mysterious captor. It's at this point that "Oldboy" explicitly opens up to an exploration of its main theme, namely vengeance.
"Oldboy" confronts us with very brutally frank questions about the nature of revenge and, concurrently, forgiveness. It wanders outside the Christian precepts of "Love thy neighbor" and "turn the other cheek" and digs deep into the consequences of vengeance and the changes it brings about in the individuals who conduct it as well as those who fall victim to it. What does the choice between eye for an eye and turning the other cheek reveal about us as human beings? What are the consequences of each choice? Do they alleviate the pain of the original wrongdoing?
At first sight, "Oldboy" might seem dead-set against revenge as an option, portraying it as mutually destructive for the victim and the culprit. But, like "Dead Man Walking" and its questions about the death penalty, "Oldboy" is much more complex. I wouldn't say that swings in one direction more than the other. I don't think that that is its goal. I think it's goal is to ask, and it does so horrifyingly well.