Seoul Cooking
Revenge not so sweet in intense Korean thriller "Oldboy"

Fasten your seatbelts for Oldboy, the psychological thriller/revenge gangster melodrama from South Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook. No moving about the cabin while Park's blisteringly intense, sometimes savagely funny extravaganza is up onscreen; you're more likely to be bolted to your seat, if not cowering under it. Without the samurai/yakuza tradition of Japan, or the martial arts muscle of China and Hong Kong to fall back on, Park (who co-wrote and directed) has to invent his own storytelling language, a bravura mix of Hitchcockian suspense, paranoid Kafka-esque nightmare, and sheer adrenalin.

Seoul businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is a disorderly drunk in a cop station waiting for a pal to bail him out. On the way home to an estranged wife and a little daughter, Dae-su disappears. He wakes up to find himself in a cheap hotel room with the window plastered over; fed on take-out dumplings through a slot in the door, put to sleep every night with narcotic gas, and with only a TV for companionship, he endures 15 years of imprisonment without ever knowing why.

When he finally busts out, older, hopefully wiser, and stronger (having trained himself to fight watching TV boxing matches), Dae-su wants only to find whoever is responsible for his ordeal, learn the reason why, and make them pay. Along for the ride is sympathetic young sushi waitress Mido (Gang Hye-jung).

Park believes in hitting you with his best shot every single frame, so you might not notice right away what a sophisticated piece of craftsmanship Oldboy is—or how dripping with ironic surrealism. (Dae-su is so pent-up, it's not enough to eat something raw at the sushi bar, he has to eat something alive—a whole squid, whose slimy tentacles wrap around his face. Mido speculates that lonely people often hallucinate colony-oriented ants, and we zip back to a moment in her past where she's weeping on a subway train, empty but for a giant Gregor Samsa of an ant in the next car.)

As played by the magnificently haggard and fearless Choi, Dae-su is no superhero; he takes plenty of punishment, yet staggers ever onward to unravel the plot against him, and the perverse precision with which it's been carried out. More psychologically visceral than merely bloody (although prepare for sex, violence, and extreme dentistry), Oldboy deconstructs the concept of revenge that fuels its plot. North Korea does all the ranting, but South Korea has a nuclear weapon too, and its name is Park Chanwook.

OLDBOY With Choi Min-sik. A Film by Rark Chanwook. A Tartan Films release. Rated R 120 minutes. In Korean with English subtitles. (***)
Review published in Good Times, April 21, 2005