"Oldboy" (Language - Korean) (2003) - Movie Review

“Oldboy” did not shock me but left me confused. It did not exhaust me but I failed several times to see the person who jails a man Oh Dae-Su (Min-sik Choi) in a room bearing similarity to a hotel room for fifteen years. The luring film begins as a vengeance story and ends as one but populates more discussions, interpretations and even lot of hate. This would disturb physically and mentally but strangely grows on you as the film is over. It resides and weighing the scenes I see a film maker’s obsession for dealing with psychology in a different dimension and some how failed or did not have the time to put us through the minds of the game player.

When we meet Oh Dae-Su and he narrates his story till on how he got on a roof top to a person on the verge of committing suicide, he is a well dressed animal. In his flash back we only know him as an obnoxious drunkard who is abducted and confined in a room minutes after talking to his daughter over the phone along with a friend Joo-Hwan (Dae-han Ji). The cell has the basic necessity and may be a luxury of Television. Entering as a stout man, with confinement unknown, he begins to train himself. He tries to scrap the walls to freedom. He learns his wife is been killed through the news channel and him being the killer. He is drugged by gas and he is been taken care of. He is fed fried dumplings for fifteen years which would prove his first clue on finding the culprit who is doing this to him. Just before he is about to escape, he is released. He has faint memory of being hypnotized. He is going to hunt and we know what he wants to do. Who would want to do this and why would they want to do this? This is a vengeance film but an unexpected one when the story unravels.

There is a hammer fighting scene which gives pains to our knuckles and brings tiredness to every muscle of ours. There is another torture scene which would make us flinch. But this is not a torture fest. And the scenes are not the ones where the torturer enjoys rather he has been hidden so long and so tired to wait for passiveness. He needs answers soon. He meets the expected stranger Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang) who takes him to her apartment when he faints in her restaurant. And the rest cannot be a guessing game. There are cryptic clues given to him through a cell phone handed mysteriously. He follows it because he has no option. This is not a nail biting thriller but a cumulative accumulation of the patience generated by the speed of the film. The fifteen years is shown painstakingly with a boredom and trauma of a caged man.

The film style is marked for its uniqueness in narration and how rarely Dae-Su speaks. The rarest words are not shown coming from his mouth but through mystic narrations. But beyond these we know that there is a past which connects Dae-Su and the deeply affected person religiously planning a mechanism to put through him one after another unsolved mysteries leaving him with vague and void frustrations. We do not know the past and we do not know the Dae-Su before his freedom snapped off. When the truth is known, there is an acceptance from Dae-Su but when the story extends more, this is going to be beyond the realization of the truth. A real vengeance.

“Oldboy” did not affect me. It left me with topics to discuss but as a film the ammunition it was gearing up and said it is delivering had a noticeable flaw. If you have not seen the film, I would suggest skipping the remaining paragraph. Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) the person who has been playing this cruel game over Dae-Su is a psychopath, a rather artistic, intelligent and deranged one. I am not basing it on the incestuous relationship with his sister because that is a part of discussion the director brings upon which is intuitive and need to be done and thought on human behavioral. It is the enjoyment he has gone through with the vengeance which has flare of inconvincibility. He does not want a kill but a long stretched mental torture unimaginable affecting an innocent girl. Separating him as a character to study seems unnecessary and almost seems injustice. But the director exactly wants this. To incite this conversation is the aim out here. “Oldboy” has the style of the film happening in a different world but the emotions being brutally real makes it difficult to comprehend the fact of its realism. Do not get me wrong, I liked the film a lot for its catalytic characteristic to look at the moral and social values defined. I believed the existence of Dae-Su but not Woo-jin. In this strange and unforgiving unknown corner of the world, there might be estranged, unmerciful and cruelly insane Woo-jin but in “Oldboy” he does not.