Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s unusually intense motion movie has misplaced none of its potential to jar viewers.
This text incorporates spoilers for the ending of Oldboy.
Many films with infamous twist endings—akin to The Sixth Sense or The Traditional Suspects—face a steep problem on rewatch. The influence of the finale evaporates, or is at the least blunted, by the viewer’s data of what’s coming. A second viewing is basically an train in detecting the breadcrumbs resulting in the large shock. When a rerelease of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was introduced for this summer time, I puzzled 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 just a few years right into a flourishing renaissance led partly by Park, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk. Nonetheless, few initiatives had genuinely crossed over to the US—Park’s prior movie Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance performed on a grand complete of six screens in North America. Oldboy gained a bit 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 finest referred to as the film the place a person eats a reside octopus on display screen, or possibly 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 provided 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 sooner or later 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 instantly launched again into the true world, the place he rapidly 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 types an alliance with a chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who appears nearly inexplicably drawn to his wildness; they ultimately turn out to be 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 usually absorbing due to the extreme anguish radiating off the display screen always; Park’s potential to successfully talk obsession, and put the viewers within the head of somebody who has nearly fully 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 Woman Vengeance, however the one factor all three share is the sense of complete discombobulation that accompanies a revenge quest, and the crooked line these paths all the time observe.
A lot of Park’s early profession noticed him enjoying the position of provocateur. The Vengeance Trilogy is steeped in excessive violence, usually breaching taboos averted by U.S. and European cinema (in his films, youngsters are often in peril). Park’s breakout movie, Joint Safety Space, a couple of 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 Resolution to Go away each drew large crucial plaudits.
I like each of these current movies, however rewatching Oldboy in a theater is an effective 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 as a result of film’s closing, 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 in class collectively way back.
It’s a laborious however in some way plausible little bit of Greek tragedy, a chunk of data so mind-rending that Dae-su primarily begs for demise upon studying it. It additionally makes the rewatch really feel a thousand occasions 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 provide an expertise like that, and it provides the rerelease an actual energy that’s price monitoring down in theaters.
