Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy - Review

Originally Reviewed on Letterboxd

5/5

*WARNING - Oldboy features violent, sexually explicit, and disturbing content. If any of this sounds triggering or distasteful to you, this film may not be for you.

During the conversation with Director Park following my screening of Oldboy, Nicolas Winding Refn pointed out that there will be 20-year-olds seeing this film for the first time who were barely alive to experience it when the film was initially released. When this happened I was hit with a sudden and startling realization; I am one of those 20-year-olds. I was roughly 7 months old when Oldboy came out in South Korea and less than 2 years old when this film was screened at Sundance. As I reflected on that factoid and the film itself on my hour-plus drive back home, I found myself focusing a lot on the passage of time. Both personally, because of how old I suddenly feel while still being so young, and in the picture. This film's primary theme is that of revenge, but time is a constant factor in this narrative. Dae-su Oh (Choi Min-sik) lost 15 years of his own life due to imprisonment, Ji-tae's character waited well over 15 years to strike, Dae-su Oh had only so many days to unravel this mystery and get his revenge, and Oh's daughter aged. All of these illustrate the passage of time within the film, but it is the 20-year-old film itself that caused me to reflect on the time that has passed in my own life. Now, my deep personal connection with this film mostly ends here, because, despite many people's theories and prognostication, I am not a homicidal machine of vengeance like "the Monster" himself. I am, however, a lover of cinema, art, and humanity, and as a result, I loved this dark, twisted, and insane exploration of vengeance and its tolls over time.

Oldboy reminded me a lot of a classic tragedy. While it pushes further with its story beats and morals than any Shakespearean or Greek tragedy I am aware of, its insane, twisted, and tortuous story gave me the same feelings of sorrow that I felt when first finishing Hamlet as a young boy. Park Chan-wook even made a similar connection himself in that same conversation I mentioned before. he said his goal with Dae-su was to create a romantic hero (as in the Romanticism period, not romantic the genre). While I personally feel his character falls more in line with the tragic heroes of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, I cannot argue that he failed to realize his goal of creating a story that rejected order and simple ethics. Oldboy's exploration of revenge is a tale as old as time, but Chan-wook adds so many new layers and complexities to this plot, that the idea of vengeance and its righteousness is never truly certain in the minds of the audience. One moment the violence is epic and satisfying, at others, the pursuit of vengeance seems a downright sinister pursuit. I was going into Oldboy with very little knowledge going in, but I thought this film would be similar to an early, action-packed John Wick film. This could not have been more wrong. While there are certainly moments of violence (and one absolutely stunning fight sequence), the film is much more of a deliberate psychological thriller. It is paced like a mystery and takes its time slowly revealing itself to you. The slow pace builds tension, but it also creates this growing sense of crazed unease that, by the final reveal, feels intentional and important. The substance of the text is elevated by magnificent style. I have heard a lot of praise directed at Park over the last year (primarily following his previous film, Decision to Leave's, release), and now I understand the praise. Park brings both artistic flare and masterful restraint to a project that under the wrong leadership could turn into a mindless and insensitive bloodbath with no human core.

Oldboy, like all great films before it, has left me in a state of thoughtful reflection for the past three hours, and I believe its themes and moral quandaries will keep it in the back of my mind for a long time to come. I am so glad that I have had the honor to age alongside this tragic parable of all-consuming vengeance, but I am also thrilled I have Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to balance it out.