Oldboy

With  moments including the ingestion of a live octopus, tongue dismemberment and a scene involving a claw hammer that would make even the bravest of us think twice before going to the dentist, Korean director Park Chanwook’s Oldboy is definitely not for the faint hearted. However it is not the films often graphic scenes of violence that make it such an intense and disturbing viewing experience but the extent of human emotion that it reveals in all its nakedness. Even after several viewings, the film still remains one of the most disturbing, and emotionally raw that I have ever watched and never fails to devastate even once the ending is known. The film starts with Dae Su, a drunken man and neglectful father who has ended up at the police station on his daughter’s birthday for disorderly behaviour. Soon after, before he or the audience has time to react he has been kidnapped and imprisoned for reasons that appear to be inexplicable. This seemingly arbitrary imprisonment lasts for 15 years during which his wife is murdered and his daughter put up for adoption. After Dae Su manages to escape by tunnelling through a wall ten stories up, he is told that he has 5 days to find the man responsible for his captivity and satisfy his desire for revenge that has been building for over a decade. Although this seems to play out as the beginning of a standard revenge story, the discovery of his captor, Woo Jin’s, motivations takes the film to an entirely different level as we begin to understand that this desire for revenge is no longer exclusive and that both men have grievances that they believe justify what they inflict upon each other. To reveal anymore about these motivations would spoil the story but it is safe to say that what follows is in turns disturbing, heart wrenching and involves a great deal of violence. Yet these events are not  simply  devices to further the plot but are  attacks on our perceptions of justice and are unrelenting in the way they force us to identify with the unidentifiable and to feel in a way that is sometimes helpless in its intensity. 

Eventually these events lead us to a series of revelations that are undoubtedly diabolical but also extremely sad, regardless of whose point of view we choose to share. In this way Oldboy is superb, as it challenges our pre existing notions of victims and villains through several uncomfortable moments where we are no longer certain of whose side we are supposed to be on.  The film is not only superb in its narrative but is visually and sonically very impressive, with several incredibly well choreographed fight scenes and an effective and beautiful musical score that is near perfect in its reflection of the films themes of impossible love and perpetual inner pain. One scene that epitomizes Oldboy’s brilliance occurs after the murder of Dae Su’s brother, as a shot of Dae Su screaming obscenities, his anger spilling over in primal urgency, is combined with a shot of Woo-Jin alone, a silent tear rolling down his cheek. It is at points like this where the films paramount message, that suffering is never one sided, is made clear and makes claims of Oldboy being a masterpiece seem entirely justifiable.