Old Boy review

I've had the pleasure of finally watching this South Korean import, and holy crap, did it ever impress, I found myself thinking about it for a few days afterwards.

Park Chan-wook's Old Boy is a confronting and delirious ride, a movie full of visceral shocks and aesthetic pleasures - it has an explosive immediacy and a persistent afterlife, a lingering impact that is hard to shake. While it has scenes of considerable brutality, its violence is expressed in a range of ways - its shock value lies most of all in what it tells us about its characters and their emotions.

Full of visual and auditory pleasures, it is a dense, carefully structured film, an enigma laid bare with merciless inevitability and moments of lyrical beauty. Some of its patterns and repetitions are apparent on a first encounter, but its intricacies need more than one viewing. It is, in the most disconcerting and disorienting of ways, an exhilarating movie.

Old Boy begins in a flurry of chaos, in a scene that is echoed in a flashback at the end of film. We are then back in time, to the moment when Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik), after a drunken rampage at a police station, suddenly disappears from view. He undergoes an extraordinary experience. He is kidnapped, taken prisoner, confined to a room, fed, maintained and spied upon. Television is his only contact with the outside world: he watches Korean political upheavals and Princess Diana's wedding, and discovers that he has become a murder suspect.

During his captivity, he tries to imagine who could have wished this fate on him: he has a rollcall of potential names, but no one of whom he can be sure. He devises strategies for marking the passage of time, for escape, for preparing himself to find out who ordered his imprisonment, and exacting revenge.

When he finally leaves his cell, he's a man on a mission. But he discovers that his unknown opponent is waiting for him: the task of retribution will be more difficult than he thinks. The question, furthermore, becomes not who imprisoned him, but why: what is it in his past that has put him in this position?

Choi's performance is remarkable: he makes Daesu a figure at once terrifying, and pitiful, magnetically watchable. Yu Ji-tae, as the urbane, controlled nemesis Daesu encounters, quite early in the proceedings, plays a crucial role in maintaining the extremity of the film's premises.

I find most Korean imports to have bad camera work, awful acting, and boring plots, but this one stand apart from them all. Old Boy, in its richness and intensity, feels like a compendium of movies and mystery stories, fables and case histories, myths and legends, distilled into a single devastating experience.