Oldboy (2003 film)

Oldboy (Korean: 올드보이; RR: Oldeuboi; MR: Oldŭboi) is a 2003 South Korean action-thriller film directed and co-written by Park Chan-wook. A loose adaptation of the Japanese manga of the same name, the film follows the story of Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), who is imprisoned in a cell resembling a hotel room for 15 years without knowing the identity of his captor or his captor's motives. When he is finally released, Dae-su finds himself still trapped in a web of conspiracy and violence as he seeks revenge against his enigmatic captor (Yoo Ji-tae). His quest becomes tied in with romance when he falls in love with a young sushi chef, Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung).
Oldboy attained critical acclaim and accolades worldwide, including winning the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where it garnered high praise from Quentin Tarantino, the president of the jury. In the United States, film critic Roger Ebert stated that Oldboy is a "powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare". The film's action sequences, particularly the single shot corridor fight sequence, also received commendation for their impressive execution.
The film's success led to two adaptations: an unauthorized Hindi remake in 2006 and an official American adaptation in 2013. As part of Park Chan-wook's The Vengeance Trilogy, it serves as the second installment, following Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and preceding Lady Vengeance (2005).
The film is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time and has been included in numerous "best-of" lists by many publications. In 2008, Oldboy was placed 64th on an Empire list of the top 500 movies of all time. In 2020, The Guardian ranked it number 3 among the classics of modern South Korean Cinema.
In 1988, businessman Oh Dae-su is arrested for drunkenness, causing him to miss his daughter's fourth birthday. His friend Joo-hwan collects him, but Dae-su disappears and awakens in a sealed hotel room. Takeout food is delivered through a pet door, and his only diversion is a television; from it, Dae-su learns that he has been framed for his wife's murder. As years pass, Dae-su grows deranged from solitude and attempts suicide by wrist-cutting, but is resuscitated. Dae-su then begins practicing martial arts against the wall and attempting to dig an escape tunnel.
In 2003, Dae-su is sedated, hypnotised, and released after 15 years. He awakens on a rooftop, where he saves a suicidal man and recounts his story; once finished, Dae-su allows the man to resume his suicide. Dae-su receives money and a phone from a beggar, and enters a sushi restaurant. Taunted by his captor over the phone, Dae-su orders and consumes a live octopus before collapsing. Taken in by the young sushi chef, Mi-do, Dae-su unsuccessfully attempts to rape her; he regretfully attempts to leave, but they reconcile and bond over their loneliness.
Dae-su searches for his daughter, but gives up after learning she was adopted and emigrated. Focusing on his captors, he eats at Chinese restaurants until he identifies which one prepared his prison meals. Chasing a deliveryman, Dae-su finds a private prison where people pay to have others incarcerated. He tortures and interrogates the warden, Mr. Park, who divulges that Dae-su was imprisoned for "talking too much". Park's guards attack Dae-su, but he fights his way through.
Dae-su reconnects with Joo-hwan, who now works at an internet cafe. Dae-su becomes suspicious of Mi-do and binds her, but his captor calls and sends him to a neighboring apartment. Using the pseudonym "Evergreen", he gives Dae-su an ultimatum: if he can uncover his motive within five days, Evergreen will remotely deactivate his pacemaker; otherwise, Evergreen will kill Mi-do. Dae-su returns to Mi-do to find Park and his thugs molesting her. Park prepares to torture Dae-su, but stops when Evergreen sends a briefcase of cash; Dae-su threatens to remove Park's hand, but Park leaves. Mi-do is upset by the ultimatum, but she and Dae-su grow closer and have sex in a love hotel.
Dae-su wakes to find Park's hand wrapped in a box; he investigates his possessions, and has his shoe debugged. Dae-su and Mi-do follow Evergreen's pseudonym to Dae-su's high-school motto: "Evergreen Old Boys". Identifying Evergreen as Lee Woo-jin in a yearbook, Dae-su calls Joo-hwan. Joo-hwan recalls a girl in his class, Lee Soo-ah, and crassly describes her sex life and suicide; an eavesdropping Woo-jin angrily stabs Joo-hwan to death. Dae-su seeks out Park, who wants revenge for his hand removal; Park agrees to temporarily imprison Mi-do to keep her safe. Talking to Soo-ah's friends, Dae-su recalls witnessing her having sex with Woo-jin. Unaware it was incest, Dae-su told Joo-hwan of her promiscuity, who then spread gossip. Woo-Jin, in denial of the truth that he got his sister pregnant, claims Soo-ah developed a false pregnancy, which drove her to suicide.
At Woo-jin's penthouse, Dae-su reveals Woo-jin's motive. An amused Woo-jin gifts Dae-su a family photo album, the contents revealing that Dae-su's daughter grew up into Mi-do. Woo-jin reveals that he used hypnosis to orchestrate their meeting and incestuous relationship, and that he paid Park to imprison Mi-do. Woo-jin threatens to tell Mi-do the truth, and Dae-su desperately grovels; when Woo-jin is unmoved, Dae-su cuts out his tongue as penance. Woo-jin accepts his apology, instructing Park to not tell Mi-do and dropping his pacemaker remote. Dae-su uses it, but it only plays a recording of Dae-su and Mi-do having sex, making him collapse in despair. Woo-jin leaves the penthouse and, recalling his failure to stop his sister's suicide, shoots himself in the head.
Sometime later, Dae-su locates the hypnotist and requests she erase his knowledge of Mi-do being his daughter. Touched by a specific line in his letter, she guides Dae-su to envision the part of himself that knows the truth dying. A concerned Mi-do finds Dae-su lying alone in the snow. Mi-do confesses her love for him, and the two embrace; Dae-su smiles, but it becomes a tortured grimace.
The corridor fight scene took seventeen takes in three days to perfect and was one continuous take; there was no editing of any sort except for the knife stabbed in Oh Dae-su's back, which was computer-generated imagery.
The script originally called for full male frontal nudity, but Yoo Ji-tae changed his mind after the scenes had been shot.
Other computer-generated imagery in the film includes the ant coming out of Dae-su's arm (according to the making-of feature on the DVD, the whole arm was CGI) and the ants crawling over him afterwards. The octopus being eaten alive was not computer-generated; four were used during the filming of this scene. The eating of squirming octopuses (called san-nakji (산낙지) in Korean) as a delicacy exists in East Asia, although it is usually killed and cut, not eaten whole and alive; the squirming is a result of postmortem nerve activity in the octopus' tentacles. When asked in DVD commentary if he felt sorry for Choi, director Park Chan-wook stated he felt more sorry for the octopuses.
The final scene's snowy landscape was filmed in New Zealand. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, and the audience is left with several questions: specifically, how much time has passed, if Dae-su's meeting with the hypnotist really took place, whether he successfully lost the knowledge of Mi-do's identity, and whether he will continue his relationship with Mi-do. In an interview with Park (included with the European release of the film), he says that the ambiguous ending was deliberate and intended to generate discussion; it is completely up to each individual viewer to interpret what is not shown.
Nearly all the music cues that are composed by Shim Hyeon-jeong, Lee Ji-soo and Choi Seung-hyun are titled after films, many of them film noirs.
In South Korea, the film was seen by 3,260,000 filmgoers and ranks fifth for the highest-grossing film of 2003.
Oldboy grossed a total of US$17,052,444 worldwide.
The film was theatrically re-released in the United States by NEON for its 20th anniversary on 16 August 2023, remastered in 4K, featuring bonus commentary by Park Chan-wook.
Oldboy received critical acclaim, and is considered an influential cult classic. Praise was also given to the film's action sequences, specifically highlighting the "all-timer" single shot hallway fight sequence. As per the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 160 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40 out of 10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Violent and definitely not for the squeamish, Park Chan-Wook's visceral Oldboy is a strange, powerful tale of revenge." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, with 82% positive reviews based on 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and remarked: "We are so accustomed to 'thrillers' that exist only as machines for creating diversion that it's a shock to find a movie in which the action, however violent, makes a statement and has a purpose." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying that it "isn't for everyone, but it offers a breath of fresh air to anyone gasping on the fumes of too many traditional Hollywood thrillers."
Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com praised the film, calling it "anguished, beautiful, and desperately alive" and "a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry." Peter Bradshaw gave it 5/5 stars, commenting that this is the first time in which he could actually identify with a small live octopus. Bradshaw summarizes his review by referring to Oldboy as "cinema that holds an edge of cold steel to your throat." David Dylan Thomas points out that rather than simply trying to "gross us out", Oldboy is "much more interested in playing with the conventions of the revenge fantasy and taking us on a very entertaining ride to places that, conceptually, we might not want to go." Sean Axmaker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer gave Oldboy a score of "B−", calling it "a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity," but felt that the questions raised by the film are "lost in the battering assault of lovingly crafted brutality."
Jamie Russell of the BBC movie review calls it a "sadistic masterpiece that confirms Korea's current status as producer of some of the world's most exciting cinema." In 2019 on The Hankyoreh, Kim Hyeong-seok said that Oldboy was the 'zeitgeist of the vigorous Korean cinema in early 2000s', and a 'boiling point that led history of Korean cinema to new state'. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called the film "a trivial genre movie," writing, "The fact that Oldboy is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys." J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader was also not impressed, saying that "there's a lot less here than meets the eye."
The film is regarded as one of the best films ever made and has been included in numerous "best-of" lists by many publications. In 2008, Oldboy was placed 64th on an Empire list of the top 500 movies of all time. The same year, voters on CNN named it one of the ten best Asian films ever made. It was ranked #18 in the same magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. In a 2016 BBC poll, critics voted the film the 30th greatest since 2000. In 2020, The Guardian ranked it number 3 among the classics of modern South Korean Cinema.
Park Chan-wook stated that he named the main character Oh Dae-su "to remind the viewer of Oedipus." In one of the film's iconic shots, Yoo Ji-tae, who played Woo-jin, strikes an extraordinary yoga pose. Park Chan-wook said he designed this pose to convey "the image of Apollo." It was Apollo's prophecy that revealed Oedipus' fate in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The link to Oedipus Rex is only a minor element in most English-language criticism of the movie, while Koreans have made it a central theme. Sung Hee Kim wrote "Family seen through Greek tragedy and Korean movie – Oedipus the King and Old Boy." Kim Kyungae offers a different analysis, with Dae-su and Woo-jin both representing Oedipus. Besides the theme of unknown incest revealed, Oedipus gouges his eyes out to avoid seeing a world that despises the truth, while Oh Dae-su cuts off his tongue to prevent the truth from being revealed.
More parallels with Greek tragedy include how Lee Woo-jin is portrayed as akin to an immortal Greek god while Oh Dae-su is merely an aged mortal. Lee Woo-jin looks young compared to Oh Dae-su, though they are supposed to be contemporaries at school. Throughout the movie Lee Woo-jin is portrayed as an obscenely rich young man who lives in a lofty tower and is omnipresent due to having listening devices planted on Oh Dae-Su and others, which furthers the parallel between his character and the secrecy of Greek gods.
Mi-do, throughout the movie, comes across as a strong-willed, young and innocent girl, and has been compared to Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus' daughter. Though Antigone does not commit incest with her father, she remains faithful and loyal to him, similar to how Mi-do reunites with Oh Dae-Su and takes care of him in the wilderness (cf. Oedipus at Colonus). Another interesting character is the hypnotist, who, apart from being able to hypnotise people, also has the power to make people fall in love (e.g. Dae-Su and Mi-do), which is characteristic of the power of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, whose classic act is to make Paris and Helen fall in love before and during the Trojan War.
Park Chan-wook has said there is a deep influence from author Franz Kafka in this movie, and that this provides the absurdity and surrealism. In interviews, Park Chan-wook has also spoken about his movies "portraying something irrational: a phenomenon that cannot be explained logically. A portrait of humanity as neither good nor evil but rather as a complex existence." This is not only evident in Oldboy but also other movies made by Park and Bong Joon-ho. For example, Parasite, Memories of Murder, and Decision to Leave do not contain archetypal good characters. There is no moral protagonist for the audience to follow. Korean Studies professor and cultural critic David Tizzard has described this as a quality of Asian cinema: "Gone are the simple ideas of good and evil. Erased are the ideas of a moral protagonist and their immoral antagonist. But because they are not good, or at least defined as such by their creators, they become something much larger, realer, and more complete than the archetypes we are spoon-fed elsewhere."
In the United Kingdom, the film was watched by 300,000 television viewers on Channel 4 in 2011. This made it the year's most-watched foreign-language film on a non-BBC television channel in the UK.
Zinda, the Bollywood film directed by writer-director Sanjay Gupta, also bears a striking resemblance to Oldboy but is not an officially sanctioned remake. It was reported in 2005 that Zinda was under investigation for violation of copyright. A spokesman for original distributor Show East said, "If we find out there's indeed a strong similarity between the two, it looks like we'll have to talk with our lawyers." Show East had already sold the film's rights to DreamWorks in 2004, and initially expressed legal concerns but no legal action was taken as the studio had shut down.
Steven Spielberg originally intended to produce a remake starring Will Smith in 2008. He commissioned screenwriter Mark Protosevich to adapt the screenplay. Spielberg pulled out in 2009.
An official remake directed by Spike Lee was released on 27 November 2013. 39 percent of critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were positive for the remake, indicating mostly negative reviews.