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The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Revenge thriller

DIRECTOR

Park Chan-wook

WRITERS

Park Chan-wook, Lim Chun-hyeong, Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Joon-hyung (screenplay); Nobuaki Minegishi (comic); Garon Tsuchiya (story)

STARS

Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong

BEFORE

2000 Park’s first movie Joint Security Area is a thriller set on the border with North Korea.

2002 Park directs Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first part of his Vengeance trilogy.

AFTER

2009 Park tries his hand at horror with Thirst, the story of a priest becoming a vampire after a failed experiment.

Oldboy (2003) is the second entry in the Vengeance trilogy by Korean director Park Chan-wook, coming between Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). The fact that Oldboy is the only one without “vengeance” in the title is telling, and signifies a difference in focus from the others.

Oldboy is certainly a revenge movie, but it is concerned more with the corroding effect of an obsession than with the catharsis of killing the one who has wronged. The very concept, in which an unassuming loser, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), is abducted and kept prisoner in a room for 15 years without knowing why, or by whom, is more about torture of the mind than of the body. This theme intensifies as the movie progresses, with both protagonist and antagonist waging a war of minds with each other in which their motives are defined by suffering, rather than by their urge for violent revenge. In this sense, Oldboy is more than a revenge movie. It is an examination of despair. When Oh escapes, he sets out to discover the identity of his captor and avenge himself, only to find that his imprisonment had itself been designed to avenge an old wrong.

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A guard restrains Oh Dae-su just as Oh learns the reason for his imprisonment. In a gesture of remorse, he commits a gruesome act of self-harm with a pair of scissors.

Blood opera

Perhaps Oldboy’s most vital ingredient is a stylistic and technical artistry that serves as a counterpoint to the movie’s violence. The director achieves this in a number of ways. First, the sound track is highly orchestral. One gruesome sequence is accompanied by the Baroque chamber music of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” The original score, by Jo Yeong-wook, is also classical in style. This creates a grandiose, operatic feel that elevates the story above the violence. The same is achieved visually, too, most memorably in a remarkable special effect in which the camera pans around Oh Dae-su in his prison cell, and his face appears almost to vibrate out of its skin, as if his mind is trying to break free from his body. The director forgoes realism in order to communicate the character’s emotional state.

A similar stepping-out-of-reality occurs at the end, when we see an elaborate flashback to the events we now realize sparked the story into life. Visually, key characters should be young—but no, they look exactly the same as they do in the present, Oldboy suggesting that they never escaped the trauma of their past. (Do any of us, the movie asks?)

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Oh Dae-su attacks the guards of the prison where he has been held captive for 15 years. The long fight scene was filmed as one continuous shot.

Hi-tech violence

South Korean movies at the turn of the century became noted for their violence, but what has been less noticed is the technical artistry that accompanies them. This was never more aptly represented than in Oldboy, a movie that is certainly brutal, but high-mindedly disturbs as much as it viscerally shocks, a revenge movie for both the connoisseur and the gore hound.

PARK CHAN-WOOK Director

Park Chan-wook was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1963. While studying philosophy at college, he discovered a love of film, and started a film studies group called the Sogang Fil Community. After graduating, he wrote for movie journals before becoming an assistant director. His first movie was The Moon Is the Sun’s Dream (1992). This was not a success and it was five years before Park got his next chance to direct. He is best known for his Vengeance trilogy.

Key movies

2003 Oldboy

2009 Thirst

2013 Stoker

What else to watch: Vertigo (1958) ✵ Infernal Affairs (1990) ✵ Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) ✵ Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) ✵ Mother (2009) ✵ Thirst (2009) ✵ Stoker (2013)