By Brandon Nolta

Imagine, just for a moment, you are a South Korean businessman named Oh (Min-sik Choi). You’re a better drunk than you are a businessman, and you’re stumbling home, late for your daughter’s birthday, when you get arrested for being drunk and stupid in public. Your friend No (Ji Dae-han) bails your ass out of the pen, and while he’s on the phone, trying to placate your wife, somebody spirits you away. You wake up in a hotel room, locked away from the world, a TV your only source of information. Occasionally, you try to kill yourself, which gets you gassed into unconsciousness, only to wake up shaved and groomed. You eat the same fried dumplings every day, watch the TV until you’re sick of it, work out and practice shadowboxing to exhaustion. The news says your wife was murdered, and you’re the prime suspect. Time passes; 15 years’ worth of it. One day, you’re set free, no explanation. All you have is a new suit, your diaries, and a list of people who may hate you enough to do this. What now?

That is the setup to OLDBOY, Chan-wook Park’s 2003 meditation on violence and vengeance, and one of the coolest, and weirdest, thrillers ever committed to film. Soon after his release, Oh decides to track down his captor and find out what the hell is going on. With only the sense memory of fried dumplings to start with, Oh goes on a search for the whack job who kept him penned. Along the way, he meets sympathetic chef Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang), who helps him on his quest and falls in love with the taciturn Oh. So far, we think we know how this is going to shake out, and then the first of several twists appears: Oh’s captor Lee (Ji-tae Yu) makes himself known to Oh, and offers him a challenge: find out why he was captured, and Lee will commit suicide. Fail to meet Lee’s deadline, Mi-do dies.


All this tells the basic plot, but not the style and verve that Park and his actors bring to their work. Choi has the broadest range to play, going from a drunken sot to a hardened manhunter, and he does it well, making every step believable. Kang is winsome and charming from the get-go, and Yu … well, this guy deserves an Oscar, because he couldn’t get a job if he were as intensely creepy as his character. Highly intelligent, patient beyond human endurance and possessed of some serious character flaws, Lee is three steps ahead at all times, and his motivation for Oh’s captivity manages to be both disturbing and inconsequential.

People who have seen OLDBOY generally remember a few indelible images: Oh eating a live octopus on-camera; Oh fighting 20 guys in a hallway unarmed, and then with a claw hammer; a guy getting his teeth removed with said claw hammer; an icky, icky flashback with Lee and his sister; and Oh performing a rather shocking bit of surgery at the climax. What is often forgotten, behind the writing, action and style that permeate every shot, is how funny this film is. There’s a lot of wit and sarcastic humor in this movie, and despite the creepy nature of the central flashback, I defy anyone with even a rudimentary sense of humor to not laugh at teenaged Oh and his idiot friends … which makes the eventual tragedy that results from Oh’s offhand remark all the more troubling.


Of course, given how things end up, laughing at this film may lead to feelings of nausea and guilt, but hey, art ain’t always pretty. OLDBOY is not for everybody by any means, but if the words “hammer” and “dentistry” in the same sentence didn’t scare you off, you’re in for a stylish, intense treat with this twisted tour de force.