Review of Oldboy / 올드보이, directed by Park Chan-wook

I think a lot of us who have seen some of Park Chan-wook’s movies can remember the first time they’ve seen it. For me, the first time I saw Oldboy was when I was a freshman in college. I was signed up for a class on contemporary South Korean cinema, and I remember I was the only freshman in the class.

I was fresh off the boat back from Korea and thought it would help me with the nostalgia factor, but it also just really introduced me to a ton of really good movies across the months was in that class. We ended up watching Oldboy about halfway through with a ton of trigger warnings from the professor, and I think that experience really stuck with me.

I’ve watched it other times throughout the years, but when Oldboy was announced to be coming back into theaters restored, I realized that it was probably time to go see it one more time.

Some movies I could watch a ton of times throughout the years—like I’ve seen Parasite a grand total of six times now. And so I ended up returning to Oldboy yet again, which was a delight to return to after a couple of years passing.

Here’s my review!

A tale of revenge, sparked through the violence of one man’s captivity and eventual freedom.

Oldboy begins in 1988, when the main character, Oh Dae-su, is a businessman. After getting drunk one night, he ends up getting arrested for being indecent in public, which is a major uh oh because it’s the night of his daughter’s birthday. But when trying to get home, Dae-su is mysteriously kidnapped and held within a room for a grand total of fifteen years.

It’s an abandoned, grimy hotel room where he is left with not much to do and the food is literally delivered through a dog door, and throughout the time of his captivity, he ends up learning that his wife has been murdered and in his absence he has been framed for her death.

As one would expect, he ends up going insane over the course of his time in the room, and attempts suicide at one point even.

So when Dae-su is randomly freed one day, he has no idea what to expect when he heads out into the world beyond this hotel room.

He has been released onto a rooftop with a suicidal man, who he pretty much lets die because he has no expectations of cruelty after it has been inflicted upon him, and then he ventures out into the great beyond. First he finds himself at a sushi restaurant, which has the scene where he ends up eating an entire raw octopus in one go, but this is critically important because he ends up meeting the female chef Mi-do.

But it’s also critical because he receives the very first call with his captor, which spurs him to eat the octopus. He also tries to rape Mi-do after the fact in her own apartment, and right after this he decides to begin his noble journey of finding out who kidnapped him and figuring out what happened to his daughter.

Upon realizing she was adopted he focuses more on the figuring out who screwed his life up portion of the story. He realizes that the hotel he was trapped in was actually a prison, and there was a legitimate, but still rather unknown, reason as to why he specifically was kidnapped.

His old friend reaches out at one point, but is then murdered. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the movie gets pretty violent as Dae-su starts the entire journey of figuring out what has happened here.

The story becomes kind of clearer with motives from this point as well, as it reveals there was an old high school classmate of theirs with a major grudge: Woo-jin. Daeu-su screwed Woo-jin over when he caught Woo-jin having sex with his own sister, and the gossip spread around the school.

The sister was so devastated she ended up committing suicide, and Woo-jin decided to get major revenge against Dae-su.

Hence him facilitating Dae-su’s imprisonment, and it’s revealed that he conditioned everything that’s happened, and hypnotized Dae-su into falling into love with his own daughter.

That’s Mi-do, making this yet another act of incest. Dae-su apologizes in order to keep her innocent, and even pretends to be a dog to get beneath Woo-jin. He even goes as far as cutting his own tongue off, which is pretty gruesome to watch.

Eventually, Dae-su snaps out of the hypnosis and unlocks the urge to kill Woo-jin, fails, but Woo-jin goes ahead and shoots himself anyways.

The film ends with Dae-su trying to get the hypnosis off, but it fairly ambiguous as Mi-do approaches him and they embrace, with the camera finally cutting to him smiling somewhat maniacally.

Overall Thoughts

Oldboy isn’t the most screwed up movie I’ve watched throughout the years, but it is definitely up there on the list at the end of the day. I think there’s a lot to unpack throughout the film about the nature of violence, cycles, and revenge, and that no matter what happens with it, most people aren’t going to escape from these systemic issues.

It’s also definitely not for the faint of heart, but there are some pretty epic scenes, like the hallway fight one where Dae-su is wielding a hammer, that make it one of the most iconic Korean movies to come out so far. I think this is a movie that’s rooted in its masculinity as well, like almost all of Park’s films, and was made before he made his mature voice as a filmmaker, which we now see in Decision to Leave.

Anyways, like I said, lots to think about.

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