MovieComment

Oldboy

Posted by Player under Independent

It is rare today to see a film that can really grab you emotionally and leave you almost breathless at the end. Oldboy happens to be that incredible a work, that you simply will never forget it once you see it. In Oldboy, director Chan Wook Park, tells the story of Oh Dae-su, a typical man who is cruising through life without really thinking about it much (the unexamined life), who is kidnapped and wakes up imprisoned. Oh Dae-su spends the next fifteen years wondering who his captors are and is then eventually freed. At this point Oh Dae-su begins his quest for vengeance and this is where the story gets even stranger.

The film features some incredible torture scenes which place it in the top ten list of most horrific film scenes, but in actuality, Oldboy is not a horror film. It is a psychological thriller that questions morality, the meaning of life, and everything in between. It is best expressed in Oh Dae-su’s metaphor of man being nothing more than a beast, an animal that even for all its transgressions is still deserving of some happiness. By the end of the film, you are not sure who the bad guy is or if it even matters. And then there is the love story, if you could call it that.

Other than Chan Wook Park’s visuals, Oldboy features an interesting soundtrack that sets the tone for much of the incredible storyline. The DVD is in DTS and sounds pretty well for an independent film. There is even a Three Disc Collector’s Edition. If you liked Fight Club for the darkness of the human condition, then you definitely need to see Oldboy.