Remember mini-mysteries? When I was a kid, we used to play mini-mysteries to pass the time during long motor tours. They were elaborate riddles that you solved by asking “yes” or “no” questions until you figured it out. One in particular I recall had a very eerie solution. A man appears at another man’s doorstep, wearing a cape and carrying a box under his arm. When the other man answers the door, something about him enrages the visitor, who kills him on the spot. When I got the answer to the story, I shuddered. Such is the case with Park Chinwook’s startling new film, Oldboy, a very unconventional, though disturbingly plausible mystery. At first you don’t know quite what to make of it. Days afterward you may find yourself huddled in a corner. And you may also be wondering if you just may have seen the future of mystery film noir.
What a diseased and visionary guy is Park Chinwook. Cruel and gentle. Tender and sardonic. Deranged. Oldboy wasn't all that violent (sadistic acts are convincingly suggested) but a very, very dark, intricate mystery that, for the most part, begins when a drunken businessman is kidnapped and held prisoner under relatively pleasant circumstances. His confines resemble a cheap hotel room from which he is never permitted to leave, and has no contact with the outside world besides a television. His name is Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) which means "One day at a time." Anyway, when he finally escapes, he sets out to find the person who imprisoned him and why they did it. A transient hands him a cell phone and a wallet full of cash. By the time all his questions are answered you're pretty much appalled, unnerved and seriously creeped out.
Even though it feels a bit long it's a terrific, involving story and the shot composition is masterful. The look of it is dark and deteriorated and cheesy bordering on derivative but it accumulates to a......what? An off the cuff intensity? The sound track keeps playing this generic stuff that runs about two notches above Muzak, it's almost affectedly nonchalant, while horrible, sinister, repugnant events transpire, but it links them to the commonplace. Then when the film is done and you've connected all the events, grotesque or inconsequential, you see that nothing is commonplace. It's all enormous and it's all inconsequential. It's as if a creator of grisly, Grand Guignol contemporary comic books were trying to explain philosophy in hyper-violent terms. Fortune cookie adages become poignant existential truths. Dopey homilies come back to bite you on the ass! Not long after he finds his way back into the world Dae-Su goes to a sushi bar and insists the Lady Chef give him something alive to eat. You haven't lived till you see this guy chewing and aggressively sucking as he swallows some kind of writhing serpent/sea creature. "Let me slice it for you, " Mido (Gang Hye-jung) offers, but Dae-Su isn't interested. And the film is filled with these outrageous acts (Dae-Su tries to jump Mido’s bones while she’s seated on the toilet) but there’s a bizarre logic behind them. Of course, there should always be some logic to anything in a film, but like more traditional mysteries, the tiniest detail is also a clue. I’ve been avoiding revealing too much because the discovery process seems so entwined with OLDBOY’s momentum. The poignancy of its message. Though it doesn’t play like a “message movie.”
There's a catch phrase that pops up repeatedly during the film: "Though I may be no better than a beast, don't I, too, have the right to live?" Trust me, it feels more resonant in context. So much of it seems to be about torture and obsession and loss of humanity, it's definitely a quantum leap from the usual excess of a Tarantino or Scorcese. In some ways Oldboy reminds me of the poems I used to critique in my packets. I didn't really know how much was there till I started writing about them. A great deal of the film’s intrigue comes from its deceptiveness and the impact of its surprises. The more information we get, the more we’re compelled to re-think our conclusions. We spend some time with Dae-Su during his imprisonment and wonder what he could have possibly done to elicit such mental abuse. When the explanation comes we’re seriously tempted to shift our sympathies. Chinwook keeps raising the issues of carnivorousness and bestiality, the capacity we have as human beings to devour each other, to change one another’s lives forever, without intention. And how precariously it can all hang on the inability to see beyond ourselves.