Viking Night: Oldboy
By Bruce Hall
August 6, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It's also a film about how judging other people makes it harder to be objective about yourself. And it's hard not to take the bait and judge Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) when we meet him, drunk and chained to a bench in a police station. Dae-su is a Korean businessman who has a little trouble saying no to the sauce, and finds himself in the drunk tank the night of his daughter's birthday. After a friend bails him out, he decides to stop at a payphone and drunk dial his little girl. Like all the best boozehounds, Dae-su doesn't seem to realize he's reached the end of his rope. Or at least, it seems that way - until he wakes up the next morning, trapped inside a hotel room with nothing but a television to keep him company.
Sounds like a couch potato's dream, right? Well it would be, except there's no way out. Every day someone slides a plate of dumplings under the door, and every night gas is pumped into the room to put him to sleep and keep him docile. Eventually the television informs him that his wife has been found murdered, he is the main suspect, and his only daughter has been placed with a foster family. Clearly this has something to do with his imprisonment, but no one ever speaks to him, and no explanation for his imprisonment is ever given. He even attempts suicide, only to awake the next day, stitched up and good to go. With his life destroyed and death out of reach, there's nothing to do but plan revenge against his unseen captors. He punches holes in the wall to stay fit, keeps a journal of his increasingly desperate thoughts, and develops a discerning taste for dumplings.
Then, after 15 years, he's mysteriously released. Finding the job market for suspected murderers a little thin, Oh Dae-su wanders the streets, his thirst for vengeance beginning to wane as the reality of his situation begins to set in. Things change when his kidnapper (Yu Ji-tae) makes contact, taunting Dae-su to unravel the mystery and face him. This he resolves to do, but plotting revenge for 15 years of torture can work up a powerful appetite. After he stops for a quick bite, Dae-su befriends a lovely young sushi chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), and ends up crashing at her apartment. When she learns of his predicament she offers to help, and the tech savvy teen and the half crazed, middle-aged murder suspect set about scouring the city for clues to who has stolen Dae-su's life, and why.
Their unlikely relationship blossoms in parallel with the unfolding mystery, and eventually becomes part of the tragic game Dae-su is playing with his former captor. No matter where they go or what they do they’re being watched, and unwittingly playing into someone else’s hands. Even when they manage to turn the tables and gain an apparent advantage, the puzzle just gets more complex, and they sink even deeper into the trap. This is the kind of movie where nobody really lives happily ever after, and by the end, it’s hard to tell whether the people who lived are any better off than the people who died. If Stanley Kubrick came back from the dead and used his unholy knowledge of the afterlife to make a film with John Woo, it might be this freaky.
So at this point, if I were to tell you that this is one of my top five favorite films of all time, you'd probably assume that I was the one who just spent 15 years locked in a room watching game shows and punching walls. But the beauty - and the horror - of Oldboy is that each time you start to question the direction of the story, an unexpected turn sets off your imagination again, and fills you with a burning curiosity to know what comes next. Choi's portrayal of Dae-su suggests a far more complex man than the drunken slob we're first allowed to see, and as the mystery begins to unfold, and the unfortunate, simple truth of this character finally bubbles to the surface, it's impossible not to cast aside your judgment and instead, pity him deeply.
What starts out looking like a by the book revenge thriller takes on multiple layers of intrigue and meaning as an intricate web of relationships begins to develop - not just between the people on screen but between the movie itself and the viewer. Park Chan-wook maintains a steady, meditative pace as his camera drifts in and out of the minds of his characters, floating through their lives, peering at them from behind walls and ultimately, transcending time itself in ways that I can only describe as hypnotic. It's hard to say more about the story itself without spoiling it, but I'll say that to call it "improbable" is a bit of an understatement. And the subject matter you're eventually asked to deal with is, for Western audiences, more than a little hard to swallow.
But it doesn't freaking matter.
Oldboy is a fable meant to remind us of the our darker side, the selfish, jaded, and ignorant part of our soul that can either lead us to outright ruin or just prevent us from being the person we were meant to be. And it does this in some very uncompromising ways. And yet, each time I felt tempted to eschew what I was seeing or to recoil in discomfort, I couldn’t. With Oldboy - as he does with most of his work - Park Chan-wook has almost created a fugue-state on film. It’s a beautiful and terrible waking nightmare that leaves you filled with fear, hope, disgust and admiration all at once. In your heart you’ll tell yourself you don’t need to see it again but - and only if you truly love film - your brain will remind you that you have no choice. It’s a brilliant and challenging work of art that you’ll find yourself struggling with for days.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit under a cold shower and hug myself for a while.