Oldboy: a sweet dish served cold

by Katrina Salvador

For some reason I find myself in this unspoken competition with a friend on who can one-up each other on some random film topic:

“Okay, what’s the most messed up recent film you’ve seen?”
“Oh hands down, Oldboy. Please tell me you’ve seen it.”
“No, but I’ll watch it sometime soon.”
“Okay, just make sure it’s the 2003 South Korean original.”

Oh boy, my friend really did one-up me with this film recommendation.

So you find yourself kidnapped and isolated inside a tiny room with not a single human interaction. Your only source of human interaction is provided by the guard who serves your meal under a tiny gap of a “door”, an analogue television with limited channels, a pen and paper with the many thoughts that possibly run through what is the remainder of your “sanity”, and the hallucinations that occur as a mysterious gas randomly consumes your room. You end up re-evaluating your life by listing every possible person you have crossed and find out that you’ve been framed for your wife’s murder. You’ve put up with this bullshit for far too long, so you plan a Shawshank Redemption-esque escape by digging a hole through the brick wall – but then the captor decides to evict you back into the real world while you were unconscious. Fifteen years later.

This is the ordeal that Choi Min-sik’s character Oh Dae-su endures, with only a timeframe of five days in the “real world” to find his captor and their motive behind it all. This two-hour vengeful feast is definitely enjoyed and recommended on an empty stomach and a strong disclaimer for the faint-hearted and vegans. Expect a slimy live octopus gobbled down by Oh Dae-su’s eclectic appetite, the Tarantino crime scene of a dash of blood and gore here and there, and plenty more queasy elements (and relationships) all in the name of revenge.

Not to worry though, director Park Chan-wook ensures that character development is at the forefront of his spectacle master-feast. Initially, we are introduced to the reckless drunk Oh Dae-su at the police station in a foolish mess before he was supposedly heading his way home for his daughter’s fourth birthday. Next minute – or more like the next fifteen years later – we witness a rage-fuelled man hammering heads in one epic long shot and all the while falling in love with the young waitress Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung) nearly twenty years his junior. All the more reason(s) to find the will to live and continue with the chase.

Despite being based on Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya’s second Japanese manga of The Vengeance Trilogy, Park Chan-wook adapts Oldboy to a universal audience by incorporating familiar western cinema tropes and paying homage to Park’s major influences. It was only when Park watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) did he realise directing was his calling. The Hitchcockian model is vivid as Park balances the scale between art and entertainment. Art can be easily recognised through a Franz Kafka perspective; from “the wrongly accused” protagonist in The Trial to the insect dream sequences in The Metamorphosis, Park replicates these elements to an extent and then withdraws at just the right amount to continually drive the narrative’s momentum. Much like Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino, the film’s sadomasochism almost crosses the exploitation territory but cleverly cuts away just before we would squirm and churn beyond disgust. Such ultra-violence reflects such an extensive psychological trauma and much like Vertigo, rejects the typical straightforward viewing as a means to connect with our own subjectivity.

Park’s tightrope act on achieving both art and entertainment in Oldboy — and quite possibly the taste of Jury President Quentin Tarantino — earned Park the 2004 Grand Prix award. Nevertheless, we’ve seen these repetitive tropes in the past, but only a few such as Park can manipulate us throughout this tragic South Korean beauty of the consuming nature of revenge. Without a doubt a unique experience worthy for a universal audience of cinephiles and movie-goers alike, that it had fallen victim for the 2013 Hollywood remake by Spike Lee and carbon copied by a 2006 Bollywood film Zinda.

Well, if I haven’t warned you enough, this is one of those few films that leaves you gobsmacked at the 1 hour 45 minute mark, but also one of those go-to films if you plan to sabotage that first date. You put that second date at risk by showing off your adventurous film taste while also turning both of you off from each other after processing the revelations and events that you both experienced throughout the tow hours.

It also took almost a sleep-night and a half before I could contact my friend again about the aftermath:

“So I watched it.”
“Thoughts??”
“Yeah, too many.”