A Still-Shocking Masterpiece Worth Catching in Theaters
Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy has lost none of its ability to jar viewers.
This article contains spoilers for the ending of Oldboy.
Many movies with notorious twist endings—such as The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects—face a steep challenge on rewatch. The impact of the finale evaporates, or is at least blunted, by the viewer’s knowledge of what’s coming. A second viewing is largely an exercise in detecting the bread crumbs leading to the big surprise. When a rerelease of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was announced for this summer, I wondered if it would suffer from the same limitations. Oldboy has one of the nastiest gut-punch cinematic conclusions I’ve ever seen. Twenty years on, would that be sustainable?
Back in the early aughts, when word of Oldboy first started to spread among American cineastes, Korean cinema was a few years into a flourishing renaissance led partly by Park, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk. Still, few projects had genuinely crossed over to the United States—Park’s prior film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance played on a grand total of six screens in North America. Oldboy gained a little more steam, partly because of its success at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino gave it the Grand Prix (the runner-up prize) and critics breathlessly noted its unusual intensity.
For young buffs like myself, Oldboy was best known as the movie where a man eats a live octopus on screen, or maybe the one where a man fights a hallway full of people armed only with a hammer. Its supposed extremity was the draw, a true jolt of excitement given that 2000s Hollywood was already starting to lean away from more challenging material as the superhero-franchise revival was beginning to take root. Indeed, all of Oldboy’s gnarliest moments feel just as visceral now. But if shock value was the only thing propelling this movie, it wouldn’t be a widely heralded masterpiece rolling out in cinemas nationwide 20 years after its release.
Oldboy follows the businessman Oh Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik), a drunken sot who is mysteriously kidnapped one day and held captive in a hotel room for 15 years, a psychological torture chamber where he learns he’s been framed for the murder of his wife. Just as mysteriously, he is suddenly released back into the real world, where he quickly embarks on a vengeful journey to find his captors and discover the reason for his imprisonment. He learns that his daughter was given up for adoption, and he forms an alliance with a chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who seems almost inexplicably drawn to his wildness; they eventually become intimate, and together find the source of Dae-su’s woes: the wealthy and insane Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae).
The film’s plot often feels neither here nor there—Dae-su, sporting a tangle of wiry hair and a permanent thousand-yard stare, is such a compelling and bizarre character that it barely matters who he’s after. Oldboy is mostly absorbing because of the intense anguish radiating off the screen at all times; Park’s ability to effectively communicate obsession, and put the audience in the head of someone who has almost entirely lost touch with his sense of self, feels unparalleled to this day. Oldboy was the middle entry in a loose Vengeance Trilogy, bookended by 2002’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and 2005’s Lady Vengeance, but the only element all three share is the sense of total discombobulation that accompanies a revenge quest, and the crooked line these paths always follow.
Much of Park’s early career saw him playing the role of provocateur. The Vengeance Trilogy is steeped in extreme violence, often breaching taboos avoided by U.S. and European cinema (in his movies, children are frequently in peril). Park’s breakout film, Joint Security Area, about a forbidden friendship between North and South Korean soldiers at the country’s border, dared to depict its North Korean characters with humanity; his 2009 vampire drama, Thirst, was the first mainstream Korean film to feature male full-frontal nudity. Of late, his work has blended provocation with more baroque storytelling and design elements; the period drama The Handmaiden and the cop thriller Decision to Leave both drew wide critical plaudits.
I love both of those recent films, but rewatching Oldboy in a theater is a good reminder of just how bluntly distressing Park’s movies used to be. So many of the “extreme” works of that era—the Saw films, Eli Roth’s Hostel—feel dated on rewatch. But there’s a core element of emotional realism that accentuates Park’s brutal narrative beats, leaving us to ponder something more than a bloody body. Part of Oldboy’s resonance is due to the movie’s final, most devastating twist: the late revelation that Mi-do is Dae-su’s daughter, and that Woo-jin arranged their meeting and affair as revenge for Dae-su inadvertently exposing Woo-jin’s incestuous attachment to his own sister when they were in school together long ago.
It’s a laborious but somehow believable bit of Greek tragedy, a piece of information so mind-rending that Dae-su essentially begs for death upon learning it. It also makes the rewatch feel a thousand times more tragic, once the viewer knows how cursed Dae-su and Mi-do’s journey is from the start. The knowledge transforms an exciting if ruthless odyssey into something cruelly terrifying. Very few current movies can offer an experience like that, and it gives the rerelease a real power that’s worth tracking down in theaters.