a twisted, cathartic experience that I absorbed for days afterward

Rating: 10/10 (18 April 2005)

Oldboy reviewed by Sam Osborn
rating: 4 out of 4
To describe Oldboy would be to imagine Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis mixed with Quentin Tarantino's revenge saga Kill Bill and placed in the cities, schoolrooms, and prisons of South Korea. That would give you a vague idea of what this film attempts. Now add elements of thick brutality, sexual torture, bizarre time-jumps and head-spinning revelations, and you may be able to envision the strange and beautiful symphony that is Oldboy.
Oh Dae-Su (Min-sik Choi) wakes up in a room. The window is plastered over with a cheap painting of the countryside, there's a bed, a television, and a small bathroom. Each night, gas is spilled through the crack in his door, Oh Dae-Su passes out and is awakened later with his hair cut. All there is to do is watch TV, beat at the walls with his fists, and chip away at the brick wall. Dae-su is imprisoned in this room eating fried dumplings and being hypnotized into amnesia for fifteen years. All without knowing who has imprisoned him and why they did so. He vows that his only objective when he escapes is to hunt down his keeper and eat him. That's right, eat him. The premise sounds as simplistic as a general revenge thriller but believe me, there is little about Oldboy that could be described as "simple".
You'll first notice Director Chan-wook Park's take on his material. Like Kafka did with The Metamorphosis, Park skips interim fluff between important sequences and nearly always just cuts to the chase. Rarely are we faced with a scene that doesn't contain an essential revelation or storyline twist. Each scene is essential in constructing Park's maze-like screenplay and does so with a pace that's unrelenting in its speed. Also, Park loves to confuse reality with dream in Oldboy. Again relating the film to Kafka's novella, Park never really discerns between fact and fiction. Many times we're presented with a scene that seems strictly dream-like (a woman on a train inhabited only by a giant ant), only to have the film carry on in the very reality we previously realized only as imagination. And he never lets us settle with characters we believe to be human. For instance, because Dae-Su's only linguistic interaction for the last fifteen years was with his television, most of his words in the real world come straight from the "truths" he heard from the TV. And many of the characters, despite making human mistakes, take vengeance in the most inhuman of ways. Dae-Su's weapon of choice is a hammer for pete's sake!
But much of Oldboy's power comes from its incredible honesty. Park uses his Kafka-esquire plotting to keep us on the edge of our seats, even in the most inhumane of moments. His violence is brutal, his sex is real, and most of all, his taste for revenge is simply palpable. He grips our psyche to mold us to his film's will, drawing us deeper into its convoluted reality and spitting us out when he's all through. It's a twisted, cathartic experience that I absorbed for days afterward. It works on all angles of our cerebral organ, evoking emotions and images that I will not soon forget.