20 Years On, Oldboy’s Revenge Story Remains a Dish Best Served Cold

The post 20 Years On, Oldboy’s Revenge Story Remains a Dish Best Served Cold appeared first on Consequence.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Oldboy.]

“Though I am no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?”

It’s difficult to overstate the impact Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy had on the international cinema scene when it was released in 2003. It hit with the force of one of Oh Dae-Su’s (Choi Min-sik) hammer strikes, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004; Quentin Tarantino was one of the jurors, and he championed it regularly in the weeks and months afterward. What’s more, it not only elevated Park (for whom Oldboy was his fourth film, the third in his unofficial “Vengeance Trilogy”) to the upper echelons of international filmmaking, but turned many Western eyes towards the stylistic and narrative possibilities of South Korean cinema.

Without Oldboy’s smash success in the West, we likely wouldn’t have seen things like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite sweeping the Oscars in 2020, or the whirlwind success of Netflix’s Squid Game — a show whose grim mixture of extreme violence and wryly satirical edge has plenty of stylistic parallels with Oldboy.

Two decades later, NEON has seen fit to upgrade Oldboy with a pristine 4K restoration and a theatrical re-release, a celebration both of Park’s auteur status and the film’s blunt-force impact on South Korean cinema’s crossover appeal. But more than that, it remains a searing raw nerve of a thriller, indulging in some of the bloodiest revenge setpieces you’ve ever seen while forcing audiences to question whether vengeance brings the release it promises.

From the beginning, Park teases his audience with the pluperfect image of a stoic, cool action-thriller hero: Oh Dae-su, dramatic music pumping behind him, stone-faced in a crisp suit and wild, frizzy anime hair. He’s holding a man by the tie just before he’s to fall off the roof of an office building, in what (out of context) looks like a threat. But smash cut to 15 years earlier, and we see Dae-su as he truly was: a drunken salaryman, yelling at police officers who’ve brought him in for disorderly behavior. He’s pudgy, clean-shaven, belligerent, pissing in corners.

Not long after that, he’s kidnapped by mysterious forces, who keep him locked in an isolated room with no human contact. He learns his wife has been killed, and he’s the prime suspect; he misses his young daughter, whose birthday he skipped thanks to his drunken antics.

In this first half, Park teases the idea that this captivity is simultaneously the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to Dae-su: Yes, he goes crazy, but from a cinematic, aesthetic point of view, he grows tough. He learns how to kickbox, he loses weight, and he’s sent out into the world in the aforementioned designer suit. Aesthetically, he takes on the look of a hyper-cool action hero.

But inside, he’s rotted to the core, a beast whose only instinct is revenge. He’s not even threatening the man he’s holding over a rooftop — he’s saving the life of a fellow salaryman about to jump himself. Not out of altruism, mind you; Dae-su craves the physical contact of being near someone else. Oldboy is a study in these revenge-thriller tropes and the innate sadness within each of them.

Chung Chung-hoon’s cinematography studies Dae-su in all his unsettling angles, glaring right into the cold, dead eyes of a man whose humanity has been stripped from him. We see him wail in erotic agony at the first woman he sees, eat a live octopus just to feel something, and dispatch his perceived foes with a cold, dispassionate remove. This first act plays out like a more conventional revenge thriller and suitably serves as the source of some of Oldboy’s commonly lingering images: that virtuoso single-take hallway fight, close-ups of teeth being wriggled out of jaws with a claw hammer.

Oldboy (NEON)

But as the film progresses, Park complicates the simple pleasures of the revenge thriller by revealing that his captor is on his own mission of vengeance — a cyclical cycle of mutually assured destruction. Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), the wealthy businessman responsible for Dae-su’s captivity, is a beautiful and equally tragic contrast to the older, beastly Dae-su. Ji-tae’s youthful face (clearly more than a decade younger than Dae-su, despite being ostensibly the same age) belies his deep sadism, which involves hypnotism and participating in or encouraging more than one type of incest. Where Dae-su’s brutality comes in the bursts of violence he enacts on henchman after henchman, Woo-jin is more surgical and calculating — “I’m sort of a scholar,” he tells Dae-su, “and what I study is you.”

Their tete-a-tete, and the tragic lack of satisfaction therein, is the thesis of Oldboy’s take on the revenge thriller. No number of satisfying, skull-cracking action scenes can make Dae-su escape the humiliation that Woo-jin has laid out for him in that devastating, horrifying climax in Woo-jin’s expertly-manicured penthouse. What’s more, the greatest violence Dae-su inflicts is on his own body and soul — supplicating himself into a dog for Woo-jin’s pleasure, cutting off his own tongue, and eventually forcing himself to forget everything he has learned about who he is and what he has done.

In the end, only Dae-su is left standing at the end of Oldboy. But this outcome brings little satisfaction; in a much more fundamental way, Dae-su is destroyed twice over. Much ballyhoo has been made of Oldboy’s thematic parallels with Oedipus the King — the protagonist unmade by the will of the gods, prophecy leading him to unknowingly sleep with a family member and mutilate himself in divine punishment. In this way, Oldboy follows the grand tradition of Greek tragedies, applied to the nominally-visceral thrills of the revenge flick. And that sophistication bleeds through, like a seeping wound, into every thread of Oldboy’s tapestry.

Oldboy, remastered, is in theaters now.

20 Years On, Oldboy’s Revenge Story Remains a Dish Best Served Cold
Clint Worthington

Popular Posts

• Bruce Springsteen Kicks Off North American Tour with World-Class Performance in Chicago: Review

• Bruce Springsteen Dedicates "I'll See You in My Dreams" to Robbie Robertson in Chicago: Watch

• Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani's Son Kingston Performs at Blake Shelton's Bar: Watch

• Foo Fighters Bring Out Michael Bublé for "Haven't Met You Yet" at Outside Lands: Watch

• Taylor Swift Announces New "Eras Tour" North American Dates in 2024

• Truck Carrying Metallica Gear to Montreal Involved in Major Accident

Subscribe to Consequence’s email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.