You’re imprisoned in what appears to be a tenth-rate Red Roof Inn room, with only a small bed, half-bath, and television. You know not who your captors are, or why you have been brought here. Every day you are fed the same dumplings, and ritualistically drugged. For fifteen years. No reason for your internment is every given. Then, one day, you wake up in the outside world. You are given a wallet filled with money and a cell phone. You are told you have five days to figure out why this has happened to you.
This is where Oh Dae-su finds himself. We meet him in 1988, where he makes a brief appearance in a local prison following an arrest for drunk and disorderly conduct. His friend Joo-Hwan bails him out. Before returning home, he decides to call his wife and daughter — it is her birthday — to tell her he has a present for her. While Joo-Hwan talks, Dae-su is kidnapped.
During the first year of his imprisonment, he learns from the television that his wife has been murdered, his daughter has been sent to live with foster parents, and he is the prime suspect. In coming to terms with his helplessness, Dae-su begins to fill notebook after notebook with autobiographical details of his life, writing down every sin he has committed and every person he has ever wronged. He is determined to find who has done this to him. He begins to train himself. He shadowboxes and fights the walls of his room, his knuckles bloodied and then callused. He tries to dig his way through the walls, but before he can reach the outside world, he is suddenly released.
What follows is a rabid search for understanding and revenge. Working on a strict time limit, Dae-su must analyze every moment of his past life, no matter how meaningless, to find the answer. His inner-monologue guides us through every step of his travels and his thought process. Dae-su’s Kafkaesque search for truth unwittingly leads him into a climactic confrontation where more truth is revealed than he ever could have imagined. Examination of the contents held inside a large, purple box, without so much as a whisper, transforms Oldboy from a vengeance saga to a horrifying tragedy.
The way this narrative is weaved together is quite stunning. It does not have an abundance of twists and turns, but the pinnacle of the story is a twist enough to justify everything the viewer has seen to that point. The cinematography is stellar, there is only one CGI shot in the entire movie (it’s quite obvious, it contains ants), and the natural landscape of Korea is not one we often encounter in films. Oldboy is also not for the weak of heart, as there are a few brutal torture scenes and other discomforting subject matter, but it is not purposeless, everything is paramount to the resolution. It’s one of the best psychological thrillers I’ve seen.
