a wild beast of a movie

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2006)

I can't say I "loved" this movie--it's far too brutal and dark to be called lovable--but I can say that hardly a week goes by without my thinking about it. Upon first seeing it I was dazed, unable to speak, feeling as if I'd been stabbed in the gut. Was this a movie? I'd always thought I knew what movies were, but Oldboy was utterly different. Other movies were about their subject; Oldboy embodied its subject. Other movies were watched; Oldboy was experienced. And after finishing other movies, I leaned back comfortably and thought fondly about how good they were; after finishing Oldboy, I was trembling, unable to fully process what I'd just been through.
Oldboy has inspired an unusual amount of vitriol (judging from some of the angry reviews here, it seems many people want revenge on the movie itself!) Many people are uncomfortable with its horrendous violence, and turn this into hatred. They're right to be disturbed. Oldboy is horrific, because it deals directly with one of the most horrific aspects of humanity: our primal need to destroy those who have caused us suffering. Chan-Wook Park employs every technical resource of the cinema--music, sound effects, set and costume design, cinematography, editing, CGI--and portrays such extreme violence, not merely to sell a few more tickets (though the movie's stylishness and brutality certainly didn't hurt its box office), but to make the audience feel, at the visceral level, the destructiveness and utter futility of revenge.
There are no concessions to the audience's sensibilities. Moviegoers are used to photorealism; Oldboy goes for portraiture. (The director has claimed the movie's cinematography was partly influenced by the paintings of Goya and Velasquez, and it shows, especially in the justly celebrated corridor fight). Standard dramatic exposition is abandoned as the movie leaps dizzyingly from scene to elliptical scene, leaving the audience to play catch-up. Scenes of unbearable torture and suffering alternate with scenes of tenderness, humor, surreal imaginings. We jump back and forth in time as we grow closer to finding out the unspeakable truth. And when all is revealed, the director adds a final twist of the knife: Dae-Su chooses to forget it all, unable to face the acts his antagonist has tricked him into committing, and the lovers are left to find what happiness they can.
Chan-Wook Park's vengeance movies are the closest the cinema has come to Shakespearean tragedy. Lear and Hamlet may be too remote from us to have the impact they undoubtedly did on Elizabethan audiences--but Oldboy is completely pulpy and modern. There are those who bristle at the comparison, rallying to the defense of "high art", those who share Tarkovsky's belief that film is a vehicle to convey sacred truths to the audience, to whom the idea that a movie can be enjoyable and intelligent is anathema. But the Bard was seen as no more than an extremely successful popular entertainer in his own time, and his contemporaries criticized him for his unruly, extravagant style-- exactly the same sort of treatment Park has been accorded. Which is to say that by comparing Oldboy to Macbeth, I don't mean any more than that Oldboy 1) is awesome entertainment and 2) explores a basic facet of human nature. You can't ask for more from a movie than that.