Oldboy: Never Going Back to my Old School

Not unlike picking jurors for the trial of a former president, it may be tough to find the ideal viewer for Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s fifth directorial effort Oldboy. Which is to say, it may be tough to find anyone interested in the 2003 film’s seminal intersection of art-house cinema and extreme spectacle who is not already aware of its many notorious moments. The Octopus Scene. The Hallway Fight. The plot twist that leaves people reeling out of the theater, hypnotized by its depraved logic.

A film with this much going on rewards an audience that can appreciate its many details on the big screen. The packed theater I saw it with at Austin Film Society was raring to go, laughing and applauding the introduction director Park filmed for this 20th anniversary re-release through distributor Neon. After warning neophytes to prepare for the film’s graphic nature, he cheekily reminded us, “There are many funny and ironic moments in this film. Don’t hesitate to laugh.”

“I thought I’d lived a normal life. But I’ve sinned so much.”

Oldboy is the centerpiece of Park’s so-called Vengeance Trilogy, bookended by Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance. Using the concept of revenge to explore cosmic moral quandaries within these otherwise-unrelated stories catapulted the director to the peak of international cinema and jolted the Korean film industry to new heights.

The film opens with an impossibly strong neo-noir hook: Oh Dae-Su, a buffoonish salaryman on a bender, is snatched off the street after being bailed out of the drunk tank. He finds himself imprisoned in a Lynchian cell resembling a down-market motel room, with no idea why he is there or what he is being punished for. His only contact with the outside world is a television, through which he learns he has been framed for his wife’s murder and his daughter has disappeared. When he tries to end his life, he is dosed with sleeping gas and given medical attention. Fifteen years go by as Dae-su plans his escape and bulks himself up into a concrete-punching vengeance machine. Then, just as he has figured out an escape plan, he is dumped onto the roof of a building, free as a bird.

The iconic character design of Oh Dae-Su is truly the stuff that memes are made of. He is set loose from his cell clothed in an impeccably stylish tailored suit, yet his hair is a matted mess that gives a sense of early man. He steals a pair of 1950s-styled sunglasses off a random woman’s face to protect his sensitive eyes from sunlight, one of the film’s many black comic flourishes.

Yet there is no hiding the towering psychological torment reflected in Oh Dae-Su’s craggy face, his eyes bottomless pools of darkness. The actor Choi Min-Sik owns the role such that it is impossible to imagine anyone else in it. (Least of all Josh Brolin, star of Spike Lee’s ill-advised 2013 remake.) Min-sik went on to portray ever more gloriously deranged characters in films such as Lady Vengeance and Kim Jee-woon’s grim masterpiece I Saw The Devil.

Eventually we meet Dae-su’s tormentor, Lee Woo-jin, a suave young millionaire partial to tracksuits and bucket hats. Woo-jin is played by Yoo Ji-tae as Dae-su’’s impeccable opposite, worldly and confident but not above slicing someone’s neck with a cracked CD-R. It becomes apparent that Woo-jin is pursuing his own vengeance against Dae-su, which seems to involve a pretty young sushi chef (played by Kang Hye-jung) that our hero meets on his first day out.

“Be it a grain of sand or a rock, in water they sink the same.”

Two things popped for me on this 4th or 5th viewing: Park Chan-wook’s impish sense of grindhouse perversity and the sophistication of the film’s images. Regarding the former, I was struck by a scene in which Woo-jin visits the jail cell, in a freaky gas mask following a dosing of sleeping gas, to admire the results of his extremely complicated and incredibly fucked-up revenge plot. Park also employs a wide range of mirror imagery, reflections and duplicated shots of Dae-su and Woo-jin in near-identical framing to emphasize their duality.

Balanced with its mythic Oedipal storyline (if you know, you know), Oldboy also features a striking amount of Christian symbolism, which Park has also explored in Lady Vengeance and his vampire-priest romp Thirst. Somehow it took this many viewings for me to register the baroque crucifix tramp-stamped above Woo-jin’s sculpted backside (he spends a lot of time showering in his surreal green-lit penthouse).

The AFS audience was primed for these fine details, as well as the notorious “big” moments. Nobody walked out during the octopus scene. There were no spontaneous whoops or gasps when Oh Dae-Su took out a dozen thugs in a claustrophobic hallway using only a hammer and his fists, in one long, unbroken tracking shot. But the big screen experience definitely made Oldboy more fun—several moments that I found incredibly dour when streaming the film alone produced big laughs that diffused its sometimes overwhelming darkness.

“Now, what joy will I live for?”

Twenty years on, Oldboy’s themes are more relevant to our current hellscape timeline than ever. Efforts to even the moral scales of grievance, even catastrophic ones, lead only to self-destruction and incalculable shards of collateral damage, reflecting the absurd chaos of the human condition. When, in the film’s final moments, Oh Dae-Su mentally separates from his ultraviolent other, which he has dubbed The Monster, it registers as a simultaneous death and resurrection. The emotional weight of his pain becomes incredibly tactile, his redemption won at the highest possible cost. A primal narrative fueled by emotionally naked performances and pure visual poetry, Oldboy is the rare perfect film.