The image is striking: a man wielding only a hammer, armed with his guts, fights his way down a narrow corridor, mauling enemies in his path. Despite getting beaten down and stabbed in the back, he gets back up, again and again.
When I first watched Park Chan-wook’s
Oldboy, it was my introduction into the world of Korean cinema, very much unlike the Korean dramas that have become a mainstay in audiences’ appetite. It portrayed a protagonist as an unlikeable but sympathetic character, a desperate man who would go to any lengths for survival. The film does not justify its acts of violence, but it is set up so that audiences buy into the characters behaving the way they do.
Choi Min-sik plays Oh Dae-su, who, on one fateful rainy night at a phone booth, gets kidnapped and imprisoned for the next fifteen years without being given a reason. Trapped in a seedy room with only the television as his link to the outside world, Dae-su watches helplessly as the world changes while he remains almost frozen in time. In that sort of solitary confinement, questioning both himself and his captors for his wrongful imprisonment, would be enough to drive anyone to the brink of insanity.
Revisiting this film made me wonder what the allure of this film was to audiences who have cited it as one of the best thrillers of contemporary Korean cinema. The hallway fight scene is often mentioned as an outlier in its cinematography and how it shows Dae-su as an almost unstoppable force. Min-sik’s intensity as an actor morphs into this insanely convincing persona of a man who is haunted by his past, with his descent into madness turning audiences sympathetic to Dae-su’s plight. Yoo Ji-tae, who plays Lee Woo-jin, is the stereotypical charismatic madman hiding behind a serene facade, with a nonchalance that is only betrayed right at his breaking point.
“Even though I’m no more than a monster, don’t I too have a right to live?”
What is it then that audiences enjoy?
Oldboy
is steeped in a cynical worldview, treating life as currency, with cruelty being dealt out without a shred of emotion. The law becomes irrelevant in the face of a vindictive agenda. Dae-su’s stolen fifteen years were decided on a whim, and upon release his only goal becomes revenge. Woo-jin is sadistic, revelling in the suffering of others for his own pleasure and personal vendetta. He serves as the archetype of a sociopath, a typical villain who has no empathy and only a diluted sense of remorse. The allure of such a character is that he has no moral code to his actions, and he serves only himself.
For fans of the really bloody, grotesque type of action,
Oldboy’s onscreen violence is not as gruesome as some might expect, given its reputation in the oeuvre of Korean cinema. It’s not a bloodbath, even though there are bodies left in Dae-su’s wake after his adrenaline-fuelled rampage. One could argue that Park doesn’t actually intend for it to be that graphic, but there is certainly an intention of making you squeamish.
In the director’s Vengeance Trilogy,
Oldboy
seems to have had the greatest impact, in part due to the hallway fight scene, and in part because Min-sik portrays his character, who, believing himself a monster, tries to make atonement for it. I think what is so captivating for audiences is seeing this caricature of madness laid bare. It’s the magnetic effect of seeing how far the human will can be bent. Are we then sadists in our own way, or is it just morbid human curiosity? What’s truly frightening, and perhaps timeless, is seeing how deranged the human mind can get as each layer of the narrative is peeled back. As the narrative unravels and Dae-su traces his history with Woo-jin, we begin to understand the twisted nature of Dae-su’s imprisonment.
