Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s unusually intense motion movie has misplaced none of its capacity to jar viewers.
This text accommodates spoilers for the ending of Oldboy.
Many films with infamous twist endings—equivalent to The Sixth Sense or The Standard Suspects—face a steep problem on rewatch. The impression of the finale evaporates, or is at the very least blunted, by the viewer’s data of what’s coming. A second viewing is essentially an train in detecting the breadcrumbs resulting in the massive shock. When a rerelease of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was introduced for this summer time, I questioned if it could undergo from the identical limitations. Oldboy has one of many nastiest gut-punch cinematic conclusions I’ve ever seen. Twenty years on, would that be sustainable?
Again within the early aughts, when phrase of Oldboy first began to unfold amongst American cineastes, Korean cinema was a couple of years right into a flourishing renaissance led partly by Park, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk. Nonetheless, few tasks had genuinely crossed over to the US—Park’s prior movie Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance performed on a grand whole of six screens in North America. Oldboy gained just a little extra steam, partly due to its success on the 2004 Cannes Movie Competition, the place a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino gave it the Grand Prix (the runner-up prize) and critics breathlessly famous its uncommon depth.
For younger buffs like myself, Oldboy was greatest referred to as the film the place a person eats a dwell octopus on display screen, or perhaps the one the place a person fights a hallway full of individuals armed solely with a hammer. Its supposed extremity was the draw, a real jolt of pleasure on condition that 2000s Hollywood was already beginning to lean away from more difficult materials because the superhero-franchise revival was starting to take root. Certainly, all of Oldboy’s gnarliest moments really feel simply as visceral now. But when shock worth was the one factor propelling this film, it wouldn’t be a extensively heralded masterpiece rolling out in cinemas nationwide 20 years after its launch.
Oldboy follows the businessman Oh Dae-su (performed by Choi Min-sik), a drunken sot who’s mysteriously kidnapped in the future and held captive in a resort room for 15 years, a psychological torture chamber the place he learns he’s been framed for the homicide of his spouse. Simply as mysteriously, he’s immediately launched again into the actual world, the place he shortly embarks on a vengeful journey to seek out his captors and uncover the rationale for his imprisonment. He learns that his daughter was given up for adoption, and he varieties an alliance with a chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who appears virtually inexplicably drawn to his wildness; they finally turn into intimate, and collectively discover the supply of Dae-su’s woes: the rich and insane Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae).
The movie’s plot usually feels neither right here nor there—Dae-su, sporting a tangle of wiry hair and a everlasting thousand-yard stare, is such a compelling and weird character that it barely issues who he’s after. Oldboy is generally absorbing due to the extraordinary anguish radiating off the display screen always; Park’s capacity to successfully talk obsession, and put the viewers within the head of somebody who has virtually solely misplaced contact together with his sense of self, feels unparalleled to this present day. Oldboy was the center entry in a free Vengeance Trilogy, bookended by 2002’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and 2005’s Girl Vengeance, however the one factor all three share is the sense of whole discombobulation that accompanies a revenge quest, and the crooked line these paths all the time comply with.
A lot of Park’s early profession noticed him taking part in the function of provocateur. The Vengeance Trilogy is steeped in excessive violence, usually breaching taboos prevented by U.S. and European cinema (in his films, youngsters are incessantly in peril). Park’s breakout movie, Joint Safety Space, a few forbidden friendship between North and South Korean troopers on the nation’s border, dared to depict its North Korean characters with humanity; his 2009 vampire drama, Thirst, was the primary mainstream Korean movie to characteristic male full-frontal nudity. Of late, his work has blended provocation with extra baroque storytelling and design parts; the interval drama The Handmaiden and the cop thriller Choice to Depart each drew huge vital plaudits.
I really like each of these current movies, however rewatching Oldboy in a theater is an efficient reminder of simply how bluntly distressing Park’s films was once. So lots of the “excessive” works of that period—the Noticed movies, Eli Roth’s Hostel—really feel dated on rewatch. However there’s a core factor of emotional realism that accentuates Park’s brutal narrative beats, leaving us to ponder one thing greater than a bloody physique. A part of Oldboy’s resonance is because of the film’s remaining, most devastating twist: the late revelation that Mi-do is Dae-su’s daughter, and that Woo-jin organized their assembly and affair as revenge for Dae-su inadvertently exposing Woo-jin’s incestuous attachment to his personal sister after they had been at school collectively way back.
It’s a laborious however by some means plausible little bit of Greek tragedy, a chunk of knowledge so mind-rending that Dae-su primarily begs for dying upon studying it. It additionally makes the rewatch really feel a thousand instances extra tragic, as soon as the viewer is aware of how cursed Dae-su and Mi-do’s journey is from the beginning. The data transforms an thrilling if ruthless odyssey into one thing cruelly terrifying. Only a few present films can supply an expertise like that, and it offers the rerelease an actual energy that’s value monitoring down in theaters.
