Complex thriller

Rating: Null/10 (27 June 2004)

Lets start saying that OLDBOY recently got the 2004 Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival; probably the most prestigious Film Festival in the world, so that must mean something about this movie.
Directed by Chanwook Park a Korean director, who was also responsible for Joint Security Area and Sympathy of Vengeance two dark superb and unexpected thrillers albeit somehow slow for the American taste?
This time, pace is a lot faster, but the movie takes the darkness of his previous work to unexpected limits.
The story seems simple. Drunk and irresponsible men is kidnapped one night and kept captive for a long time, in a room with a TV set. His wife is killed at the same moment, becoming the prime suspect; his daughter sends to foster parents.
He plots to escape and get revenge on his kidnapers, but everyday he is treated with brainwash drugs and hypnosis. After 15 years he is suddenly released without any explanation. He receives money and a cell phone, from where a voice tells him that he must seek revenge.
With the help of a young woman he accidentally meets, he starts seeking his captors in a growing spiral of violence, but everybody around him seems to be part of a plot leading him to unexpected situations.

What starts as a vengeance movie, slowly becomes a puzzle where all pieces match by the end. This is like THE SIX SENSE without the phantasms.
Chanwook Park has created a movie about the human condition, about the subjectivity of good and bad. When the movie reaches its conclusion, all-moral values are destroyed and many people will be looking for the purifying fire that never arrives. I cannot tell more without spoiling the movie, but let us just say that according to this movie, SIN IS A MATTER OF KNOWLEDGE.
Beware; this movie is for adults. Not because of the sex scenes that are just what the movie needed or the violence that is probably more than necessary, but because no young person could ever understand how deeply philosophical this movie gets.