Oldeuboi, South Korea, 120 minutes
Director: Chan-wook Park
Writers: Garon Tsuchiya, Nobuaki Minegishi, Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim, Joon-hyung Lim, Chan-wook Park
Photography: Chung-hoon Chung
Music: Hyun-jung Shim
Editor: Sang-beom Kim
Cast: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hey-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Jin-seo Yun
Oldboy tells a moody, stylish, elaborate story that turns on revenge and the various fruits it bears—equal parts cautionary tale, puzzle movie, and brutality catharsis. In the end it somehow manages to amount to a good deal more than the sum of its parts, even as it pays off all expectations and then some. There's more than a little potential for credibility breakdown on close examination of some of the plot points it plays with, such as hypnotism and coerced amnesia, not to mention the central conceit of a privatized imprisonment industry (presumably on the black market!). But there's a good deal of complexity and nuance happening under the surface too—and the narrative momentum of the screenplay is powerful, the players here all entirely up to delivering the goods. It's an absorbing and even thrilling ride from beginning to end.
When we first see Dae-su Oh (played by Min-sik Choi in a performance that is brilliantly mannered, notably as it conveys the physical aging caused by emotional trauma), he is a drunken lout in a police station, an obnoxious jackass his friend must bail out in order to get him to his daughter's third birthday party on time. Even as he is released he can't resist one more obscene gibe at the cops before running away. He obviously considers himself someone not to be fucked with—yet shortly after, even with his friend attempting to hand-hold him home, he disappears into the rainy night.
We next see Dae-su two months later, imprisoned in a concrete-reinforced studio apartment with bathroom, television, and other homey amenities (including a light source behind a glass painting framed with curtains like a window and a poster with a horrifically leering image and the legend, "Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone"). Dae-su curses at the person who delivers food through a slot at the bottom of the door, he grovels and apologizes, he pitches a furious tantrum of frustration, demanding to know who is doing this to him, and why, and when it will end. He is already in a kind of state of psychosis, suffering frequent gassings to sedate him, and prone to hallucinations of insects living inside him. And it's only been two months—little does he know his imprisonment will eventually last 15 years.
The puzzle aspect of the picture begins in earnest upon his release, which is as sudden and unexplained as his imprisonment in the first place. It's testament to how well this movie does what it does that this was not a point where I wanted to sit back and mutter, "The only way I'm going to get any answers to this now is to wait for the movie to deliver them." Instead, it neutralizes all impatience about its narrative extravagances by constantly throwing up new and diverting detail: a love interest, Dae-su's fantastic skills in fighting as he sets about his mission of vengeance, and, more than anything else, the galvanizing strokes of character development as Dae-su begins to take remarkable new shape in front of us, like some butterfly of hell emerging from its cocoon.
The first thing he wants to do on his release is "eat something alive," which deepens a theme already sounded but, with this, perhaps for the first time really raised to conscious levels of focus. The part of the human body that Oldboy is most obsessed with, and returns to again and again in one way or another, is the mouth, the part of the body most associated with both communication and appetite—two aspects of human behavior that arguably get Dae-su into his predicament in the first place.
During his imprisonment, Dae-su first expresses the specific nature of his own intentions for vengeance, and it won't be the last time he uses words to this effect: "I'll rip your body limb from limb and your remains will never be found," he declares. "Because I will swallow every last bit." Across the length of this often very harrowing movie the worst violence is committed again and again on people's mouths.
In just such ways director and co-screenwriter Chan-wook Park keeps the action hurtling forward. There's no time to get bored or impatient about information held back. Intriguing and organic plot developments keep arriving with a dependable rhythm. There's a sense never lost that we are in the hands of someone who knows exactly what he's doing, whether that's the filmmaker or the film's bad guy, Woo-jin lee (played nicely as preppy nightmare by Ji-tae Yu), who starts to show up like something seen at the edges of peripheral vision shortly after Dae-su's release—a sense that nothing is superfluous or even entirely gratuitous however much it may appear so, and that everything is going to add up.
And in the end that's exactly what we get, in a big finish at the reveal that goes well over the top yet even so remains entirely within itself and ultimately controlled, as it appears to neatly tie everything together. Does it actually tie everything together? I think it might. But I'll know more about that when I pay it a revisit at some point down the line. To me, any movie that leaves me satisfied and at the same time certain that I want to see it again to tease out some more of the complexity, and to see better how it does what it does, is a very good movie indeed. Oldboy is a very good movie indeed, and I'm glad I had the chance to catch up with it.
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