A complex film about love and the price we must pay to save it.

Rating: 9/10 (13 December 2004)

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy is a grisly, ultra-violent, but wildly exhilarating experience, unlike any I have encountered at the movies this year. A grand prizewinner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Oldboy has plenty of action, startling visual effects, dark humor, and an existential mystery that will linger in your mind long after the final credits have rolled. Based on a manga by Tsuchiya Garon, Oldboy has elements of revenge but to describe it as a "revenge saga" is perhaps to oversimplify things. It is a complex film about love and the price we must pay to save it.
The opening scenes offer a bit of slapstick as young Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik) is hauled into the police station for public drunkenness on his daughter's birthday. After being bailed out by a friend, he is kidnapped and wakes up in a bleak room designed to look like a hotel but with a false view window and a locked steel door. He is being held captive but where, why, by whom, and for how long? He receives no answers, only food fed through an opening at the bottom of the door. Drugged to sleep by Valium gas, his captors come during the night to clean his room and cut his hair. When he finds out that he must remain imprisoned, his mind begins to unravel and he goes through several breakdowns.
He is hypnotized but never meets his captors. The only human faces he sees are those on the television screen where he learns one day that he is a suspect in his wife's murder. Driven only by an insane desire to get out and enact revenge on his jailer, he trains himself daily to stay in shape by punching the wall. After fifteen years, he is released but soon finds out that the world outside is as much of a prison as his room. He is deposited on a roof and finds a man ready to kill himself; yet he has no compassion, only the single-minded drive to find and kill those who imprisoned him. Without money or friends he does not ask questions when a stranger provides him with a cell phone and a wallet.
Obsessed with finding the truth for himself, Daesu begins his investigation by sampling food from the Chinese restaurants in the area to find the one that provided the food during his captivity. At one of the restaurants he meets and is nurtured by a chef named Mido (Kang Hye-jeong), but he is afraid of trusting anyone. Daesu is too bent on revenge to care much for human relationships, but little by little his attachment to Mido grows. There is a sequence where Daesu has to fight his way past a gang of thugs in a narrow hotel corridor that stands out for its naturalism. Shot in a continuous tracking shot, the scene allows its audience neither the comfort of glamorization or even much in the way of style, but simply shares the drama of a terrible struggle for survival. Like much of the movie, the scene is arresting.
Daesu's captor tracks his every move and we learn that his tormentor is a former schoolmate who blames him for a terrible event in the past. A strange blend of horror and beauty, Oldboy is not for the squeamish, but if you can stand the grimmer moments you will enjoy one of the most memorable films of the year. Park does not condemn or stand in judgment of his characters but allows us to see them as flawed human beings who have been pushed into taking extreme measures to salvage what remains of their dignity. If the ending is a bit harsh, it also has moments that are tender. Oldboy can be repulsive but it has a great deal of humanity and Daesu's pitiful sadness and longing for redemption reminds us of our own vulnerability.