Oldboy - Oh! Boy.

(2003) ★★★★★

What if you were locked up in a room for 15 years, without knowing who did it to you and why? What if there was no one or nothing you could talk to but a TV set? What if there wasn't even a window to let you feel the world outside? What would you do? I guess you may try punching your way out or simply killing yourself like he does. I'm talking about Oh Dae-su in Oldboy.

Dae-su is just an ordinary businessman. He's got a wife and a daughter. One night, for some sorta reasons, he gets violently wasted and is detained by the police. One of his friends comes to bail him out. And he's ready to go home to celebrate his daughter's birthday. But then he disappears without a trace right outside a phone booth while his friend's making a call to his wife. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a room with only a TV to entertain him. He's offered food regularly to stay alive. And when he can't sleep, there'll be gas out to help. Later he learns from the TV that his wife's killed, his daughter's sent away, and he's the prime murder suspect, meaning he'll be wanted if he escapes. After being kept for 15 years straight, he's finally released to investigate who's behind all this and take revenge if possible. Mi-do, a young chef, is there to take him in and help. Surprisingly, the mastermind named Woo-jin shows up himself later and asks Dae-su to find out why he wants to play him like that within 5 days, or he'd kill Mi-do.

What Oldboy amazes me are not only those plot twists but also its purposeful violence. Some violence is only there to sicken or scare you like you're supposed to feel sick or scared. Oldboy's violence, however, is so appropriate and necessary that it'd make you ruminate on human nature in facing mental and physical tortures, as well as the struggle between desires and morals. It, therefore, does stun me in a way.

A man shut off from the masses for 15 years is in fact mentally dead. And when he seems to have found a ray of hope of being reborn, turns out it's just the cause of a life-long remorse and self-condemnation. Oldboy looks like a revenge story on the surface, but what it really tries to tell us is how the dark side of human nature works to lead us to a dead end. Violence is never a solution to the cessation of violence, but why would we never learn?