Old­boy (2003)

A film that for many has act­ed as a gate­way to South Kore­an cin­e­ma, Old­boy, the sec­ond part of Park Chan-wook’s ​‘Vengeance Tril­o­gy’ is also his most infa­mous. Still revered today across all kinds of screen arts, its most famous sequence, a vir­tu­oso sin­gle-take hall­way fight, has inspired var­i­ous imi­ta­tors for well over a decade. But what makes Old­boy spe­cial is its con­sid­er­a­tion of the vio­lence that it por­trays – with each blow of the ham­mer, the film responds: ​“even though I am no bet­ter than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?”

Based on a man­ga of the same name, Old­boy is the sto­ry of Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), the film’s pro­tag­o­nist and vic­tim. He’s intro­duced as an ordi­nary white-col­lar busi­ness­man, miss­ing his daughter’s birth­day after a night of drink­ing lands him at the police sta­tion. Short­ly after being bailed out, he dis­ap­pears with­out a trace, impris­oned for 15 years and then sud­den­ly released with no expla­na­tion as to why, left with five days to find the answer.

His cap­tiv­i­ty brings a desire for revenge which turns out to be equal to that of his cap­tor, who is just as vio­lent and spite­ful, but infi­nite­ly more sadis­tic. No defin­i­tive judge­ment is cast on whether or not Dae-su is a good man, Chung Chung-hoon’s cam­er­a­work observ­ing him with almost impar­tial remove. As his cap­tor says: ​“I’m sort of a schol­ar, and what I study is you”.

And so, we the audi­ence join him in view­ing his meta­mor­pho­sis. This isn’t to say that Old­boy is a cold movie; if any­thing it’s high­ly emo­tive at every turn. A lot of care is put into cre­at­ing Dae-su, as he changes into a beast­ly yet cap­ti­vat­ing agent of vengeance, then into some­one who might actu­al­ly have the hope of becom­ing a bet­ter human being.

The first act fol­lows a fair­ly con­ven­tion­al revenge thriller tem­plate, with exhil­a­rat­ing fight scenes filmed with clar­i­ty and grit. But the vio­lence is rarely sat­is­fy­ing. As the film moves into its final act, every bloody action is near unbear­able – even though it’s most­ly implied – as though it’s too great a hor­ror to be seen. It’s also worth not­ing that it’s a far fun­nier film than its rep­u­ta­tion would sug­gest, mix­ing tragedy and pitch-black humour from the jump.

The chief plea­sure and hor­ror of this film lies in Park’s slow twist­ing of the knife into Dae-su’s side, tak­ing away any kind of tem­po­rary sat­is­fac­tion with each new humil­i­a­tion – the final turn being the most improb­a­ble and deliri­ous­ly twist­ed. Fif­teen years on, Old­boy has lost none of its capac­i­ty to shock and delight.