Old Boy

Director: Park Chan-Wook
Starring: Choi Min-Sik, Yu Ji-Tae, Kang Hye-Jeong


Guy calls family to say he's coming home.
Gets knocked out.
Wakes up in a room and is held hostage but kept alive. For 15 years.
Then, he's released and given help by his kidnappers to discover the reasons.
They want him to know. But not all at once.

With this scenario setting up Old Boy, the audience and main character Dae Su (Choi Min-Sik), become one.
This is the movie's main device. You are strapped in with Dae Su. You only know as much as he does, with none of the "meanwhile...in the next room" cut-aways you get in normal movies. The clues he gets are the ones you get. And if he doesn't understand it, you'll never figure it out on your own.

On the way, he meets a waitress who becomes his sidekick after nursing him back to health after a bad Korean kimchi episode (know this: that octopus was alive, and it was real). The sequence of events that unfold from then on are sadistic and graphic. One fight scene in the hallway is a one-take-no-cut 4 minute tracking shot of a slaughter with its slow, maddening security camera style pan. But as excessive as it seems to get so many points (dentist's chair, pliers, you make the connection) it is also madly economic story-telling. You only know enough to get to the next scene and if you feel you don't know where it's going, that it's all gonna end in fucking tears, it's because it is. And it does.

Not since David Fincher's Se7en has a movie's ending been so downbeat, so downright cruel yet so well conceived. Even ask you look in horror and ask "How could this be?", your gut tells you "How could it not?"