Review: Oldboy (2004)

After a man becomes violently drunk and chained to a wall at a police station, his friend comes to bail him out. While his friend is on the phone, the man disappears in the middle of an empty street during the middle of the night. Once this man comes back to consciousness, he finds himself in a rundown room with nothing but an old bed, a television, bathroom area, and a desk. This is the setting of where the man will spend the next 15 years of his life without human contact. He cannot leave: there is a metal door but with no handle in sight and nothing but a small slot for food to be slipped in. Time to time a song begins to play as the room begins to be filled with a strange gas that causes the man to lose consciousness. When he comes to he finds that his clothes have been changed, his hair has been cut, and that his room has been tidied up.

During his stay, the man does not have much else to do other than watch the television. This becomes his world and he fills his journals every day with what he has gleaned from it as well as how he feels about his current situation. It's even from the television that he learns that his wife has been murdered, that the police have found traces of his blood at the scene, that his daughter has been adopted and moved to Sweden, and that if he were to ever leave he would be a wanted man.

It's safe to say that director Park Chanwook looks at the man, Oh Dae-su, in a manner that can only be seen as objective, never showing or asking for sympathy from the viewer thereby causing the audience to be very removed from Oh Dae-su and his plight. Even at one point in the film when Oh Dae-su confronts his kidnapper, the kidnapper says "I'm sort of a scholar, and what I study is you."

When we first meet Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-Sik), he is an ingrate who has unfortunately missed his daughter's birthday and now sits helplessly in a police station foolishly wearing the angel wings that he bought for his daughter. Oh Dae-su isn't a despicable man, he just has been rendered useless by alcohol.

Due to the violence and sexuality, this is the kind of film that can't really be made in the United States anymore, as a result of the values of the morally permissible upon the industry as a whole.  This is why Oldboy is such a powerful film: when it boils down to it, it's not what the film shows, it's about the different layers of the human heart and mind it begins to show over the course of the 2 hour running time.

Once Oh Dae-su is released he is a different person than when he first was imprisoned. Now he is consumed with the want for revenge and is extremely responsive to kindness. This leads up to the point where he meets Mido (Gang Hye-Jung), a young chef who instinctively feels that he has suffered, where over time she begins to feel sympathy for him, care for him, and love him.

Very soon after the beginning of the film, it quickly changes from a mystery to a tragedy of the classical sort. Without dropping a spoiler bomb on the events that are revealed as the film takes its course, it's safe to say that they aren't pointless events to exacerbate the story, but instead are events that serve to turn the screws of madness and mental anguish and poetic justice. Oh Dae-su is a man with the want for revenge so much so that it slowly becomes a consuming need for revenge, eventually when he discovers his captor's reasoning behind his imprisonment is much more diabolical than Oh Dae-su's quest for closure.

The violent scenes do not play out for mere shock value, but are more of the make up of the film. As a result of his long imprisonment, being within close proximity to anyone is a sharp stab at Oh Dae-su's emotions. At  a scene in a restaurant he asks for "something that is alive" and this is for a reason other than it being a custom to eat living seafood in Asiatic culture. It's because Oh Dae-su wants to feel the life that he has been deprived of for the past 15 years since he has been buried under death instead. This also raises the question of why Mido would take such a sorry wretched man into her life when she has so much potential. Maybe it's because she sees how he is so totally helpless, maybe it's because she believes him, or maybe it's because she's seen that the past 15 years have turned him into someone who is strong and "good" when he used to be so weak and despised.

When the moments of revelation do occur, they are bounded by the fact they are given context which attributes a deeper meaning to them. Yes, the ending is so complex that it is improbable, but it's not completely impossible because of how Oldboy journeys to the emotional extremes of human beings.So many films present themselves under the guise of a certain genre that it takes us off guard when we are presented with a film that has a statement to make.