Cast: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang
This award-winning Tarantino-esque Korean revenge movie (among others, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004, at which Tarantino was jury president) holds nothing back in its nightmarish scenarios, weird characterisation and extreme violence. The surreal opening scene is gripping. Oh Daesu (Min-sik Choi) is holding a man by his necktie. The man, clasping a small white dog, is about to fall backwards from the roof of a building. The bizarre completion of this scene is shown at the end of the first act, and in the meantime a flashback brings us up to speed on the background. Oh Daesu is an objectionable drunk who disappears one night on his way to his young daughter’s birthday party. With no idea why or by whom, he is imprisoned for fifteen years in an anonymous motel-like room with ghastly orange wallpaper and only a TV for company. He watches hours of TV and grows progressively crazier. He trains himself in boxing by smashing with bandaged hands an outline of a man drawn on the wallpapered wall. His suicide attempts mount up, his journals are filled and he begins to pick his way out of his prison with a chopstick working the mortar from around the bricks in the wall. In a voice-over, he tells us that when he hears music, gas comes and he falls asleep. When he comes to, his hair is cut and the room is cleaned up. He tells us he knows it is the same Valium gas used by Russian soldiers on Chechen rebels. His food is pushed through a slot at the bottom of his door. At all times his captors are anonymous and faceless, except once when he is being hypnotised by a beautiful woman in a cheongsam. Disjointed dream/ nightmare sequences interposed with short, desperate scenes of his gradual deterioration contribute to a feeling of unpredictability and hazy-time in this movie. Like Oh Daesu, we are unsure of what is really happening. He escapes (or is allowed to think he has). He meets the man on the roof with the dog, who gives him a phrase which is repeated later in the movie. “Even though I am no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?” After being given a phone and a wallet by an anonymous homeless man, he embarks on a quest to find out who has done this to him and why, and to wreak his revenge. In a memorable scene in a sushi bar in which he eats a live squid, its tentacles curling obliviously around his nose and chin, he meets Mido (Hye-jeong Kang) a young woman as lonely and disconnected as he is and after he passes out, the squid still undigested, she takes him to stay in her apartment. In his journey to find out the perpetrators Oh Daesu finds there are people watching him – a stranger addresses him teasingly by name over the phone, the internet or as he gets into a car – and he gets closer to the strange, convoluted truth like a headlong locomotive ploughing through anything in its path at top speed. There is a fight in a corridor full of men in which he is relentless and none of them are a match for his iron bar. When he finds the fellow who had the job of imprisoning him, he extracts his teeth with a claw hammer. The violence is graphic and extreme. As a mystery thriller there are a few moments where, like the otherwise relentless Oh Daesu, the movie runs out of steam and falters around looking for direction. Similarly the acting is somewhat uneven, and there are some plotholes among all the twists and turns of the plot. The flashbacks are as fragmented as the ubiquitous shards-of-glass pattern echoed on wallpaper, tiles and the suspicious gift-wrapping paper throughout the film. On occasions the constant guesswork required is maddening, at others the revelations are annoyingly facile. Some repeated phrases, such as “Be it a grain of sand or a rock, in water it sinks just the same” which apparently has ominous import for the perpetrator, fizzle when the final denouement is reached. Nevertheless the camerawork is impactful and some images, of violence particularly, are indelible. Themes of desire - for love and sex as well as revenge - are heavily layered with those of the unknown consequences of our thoughtless actions. The perpetrator's obsession with the punishment and torture of Oh Daesu becomes the latter's, as he tries to even the score, and then turns bizarrely on himself when he realises the truth, layer by layer. There's also the notion, played out spectacularly, that if revenge is one's sole reason for living, once revenge has been exerted, there is nothing left. The acting, notably by Min-sik Choi as the bedevilled Oh Daesu, Hye-jeong Kang as the isolated Mido, and Ji-tae Yu as the mysterious, elegant perpetrator Woo-jin Lee, is for the most part convincing and memorable. At two hours length, a great deal is packed in, and yet some judicious editing could have avoided some meanderings of the script without taking away the admirable absurd elements. Overall, Oldboy is a darkly humorous, crunchy revenge movie with bite. © Avril Carruthers 20th March 2005
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