Oldboy
A drunken businessman is detained by the police. It is his daughter’s birthday. He is released. He makes a call to his daughter apologizing and saying he’ll be home soon. His friend then gets on the phone. The businessman disappears without a trace, however, when the friend wants to put him back on the phone. Where did he go? He’s been kidnapped and locked in a hotel room by his captor, where he will stay for 15 years before being released as abruptly as he was snatched.
Who took him? Why was he taken? Those are the mysteries that the businessman- named Oh Dae-su (played with haunting and hypnotic intensity by Choi Min-sik)- will be trying to unravel for the rest of this fresh, startling, and disturbing crime thriller from Korea, a recent hot-bed of exciting filmmaking (see this and last year’s “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring”). The director of this film is Chanwook Park, a hot commodity among the geeks like Ain’t It Cool News’ Harry Knowles, who’s been championing this talent since he saw his debut film in 2002, “Sympathy and Mr. Vengeance” (which is worth tracking down on the imported DVD for those who check out underground video stores).
That “Oldboy”- which was the “runner-up” at Cannes last year behind “Fahrenheit 9/11”- has gotten a limited run is a testement to the hype surrounding Park- that he’s the real thing means it’s more than just hype. Both “Sympathy” and “Oldboy” have their moments of nausia-inducing unpleasantness (in “Oldboy,” it’s when Dae-su eats a live squid), but both are fascinating explorations of revenge- the emotions that motivate it, the events that inspire it, the guilt that comes with it (for both the avenger and the avenged upon), and the moral that in the end, vengeance never brings closure. Park brings narrative imagination not only to the writing (he cowrote the film with Jo-yun Hwang and Chun-hyeong Lim) but the directing, leaving the audience off-guard and taking the story to unexpected places emotionally and turning the story on it’s head in an unsettling finale that questions the morality of the main character, who we’ve come to understand and sympathize with throughout the movie. But as I said, vengeance never brings closure, which is just what Park is telling us with this final, haunting scene of this smart and rigerous powerhouse.
