Oldboy: a monster is created.

Rating: 10/10 (19 August 2006)

This movie floored me. I first watched it at about two in the morning, and it was impossible to sleep afterward. I thought, "Did I just see that?"
Chanwook Park allows the viewer inside the paranoia of Oh Deseu's crumbling reality, wherein everything is suspect as manufactured. Bugs crawl on his skin, gas drifts into the room and knocks him out for indistinct periods of time, and he tattoos the passing years with stitches as his mind melts away. Pure animal instinct takes over completely. Trying to find the reason behind his long and mysterious imprisonment, Oh Deseu backtracks through a life of misdeeds. Numbness, time, solitary confinement, memory, and television have programmed him into a sick, revenge-bent machine. Once out, there is but one act in his thoughts, and that is to kill. Little does he know, though, that finding the puppet-master is far easier than defeating him. The "justification" for the entire episode falls frail in comparison to the punishment handed out, and Oh Deseu's love-tragedy plays out with a gravitational force, with an air of inevitability... like a feather falling to the ground. It is no matter that the blame for the original sin falls onto the puppet-master's lap, and Oh Deseu is but a scapegoat. The movie is a meditation on the many shapes that revenge can take, and the justifications and means humans employ to seek it. This tour-de-force details the molehill's evolution into a mountain, with only the passage of time and magnification of distinct memories to be held responsible.