Oldboy

Oh Dae-su is first seen stumbling around in a police station, held for D and D for hours before his buddy Joo-hwan picks him up.  Dae-su has missed his daughter's birthday, and after a late night apology call from a phone booth, his fate is sealed to miss many more after he is kidnapped.  Banished to what appears to be a seedy hotel room...for the next fifteen years.   He will learn that his wife has been murdered, and he may have been framed for it.

This is the opening of 2003's OLDBOY, a brutal and perverse tale from co-writer/director Park Chan-wook, based on a Japanese manga.  The story continues as Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) slowly goes mad, passing the time watching television and punching the wall, raising his threshold for pain.  Every day, he is knocked unconscious by a gas pumped in the room.  He awakens with his hair cut.   He learns to box from the telly.

One day, he awakens on the roof of the building after a round of hypnosis.  He's now free? A vagrant hands him money and a cell phone.  Soon after, Dae-su's longtime captor calls and, while admitting his identity, offers only more riddles. Good thing he meets a cute sushi chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who takes pity and invites him home.

OLDBOY will waste little time getting to its mean business, but while you could call this South Korean feature an action flick, it is a highly thoughtful one, more interested in abnormal psychology than thrills. Its concerns run more towards character analysis.  Toxic nostalgia.  Family dysfunction, which is putting it quite mildly.  Even theological themes like predestination get some mileage.  But the fight scenes are bravura, including one where Dae-su takes on a battalion of opponents and bests them all, despite having a knife sticking out of his back.

Chan-wook is a stylist, and his visuals evoke the comics well enough.  He does not show off that often, save a red dotted line graphic representing the trajectory of a hammer behind someone's head.  There will be another scene with a hammer and a row of teeth you will not soon forget.  Likewise for the infamous octopus scene, prior to which a line of dialogue is uttered that seems like something out of Chuck Palahniuk.

OLDBOY will prove too unpleasant and ugly for many viewers.  Some others who dig the darkness might find it too slow for their taste.  I found it original and fascinating. Complex, too.  It is far more than just another story of vengeance.  I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.  Obsessed, really.  Like the film's characters.