Oldboy


Director: Pak Chan-Wook

This film left me unsettled for days. Almost Kafka-esque in explication, with a smattering of how film noir might be if it crossed over the Asiatic continent to Korea, it leaves the viewer dazed, but determined to dissect and understand.

I can't say much about the film itself, simply because so much rests on its superb story line, the gradual and excruciating revelation of meaning, the layers peeled open with every frame to reveal the cold kernel of truth. But I will say that it is stunningly shot. Innovative angles, montage sequences that expertly remain on the right side of indulgent, a genuine sense of cinematographic breathlessness; it all lends itself to an air of carefully crafted anarchy.

Interesting things to look out for during the film:

  1. A legendary fight sequence in a corridor, where the protagonist, Oh Dae-Su, beats down twenty men with a knife in his back. What's fascinating about this sequence is that the scene is shot in one single take, without any edits, along the length of a cross-sectioned corridor (as in a Super Mario Brothers video game).
  2. The scene where Oh Dae-Su EATS A LIVE OCTOPUS. And he had to eat it four times to get the shoot right.
  3. Bach (or was it Vivaldi? I can't quite remember) playing in the background to a torturous scene of someone getting their teeth ripped out. What I remember was the incongruity, which worked so macabrely nonetheless.
  4. The very last scene, where the smile morphs almost imperceptibly into a grimace.

I'll say no more. I've already said too much. I have interesting observations to make about the ending, but I shan't pursue that here, so if you're interested you'll have to ask me.