(2003; Oldeuboi, Korean with English dubbing) "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. "And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks at you." Be prepared to watch some of the most violent, gruesome, disturbing scenes you may ever witnessed on a movie/TV screen; the conclusion is astonishing. "Even though I'm worse than a beast," says Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), "don't I have the right to live?"

Arrested for drunkenness, Dae-su leaves the police station under the care of his friend No Joo-hwan; but as Joo-hwan speaks to Dae-su's young daughter from inside a public-telephone booth, Dae-su disappears.

Finding himself in solitary confinement - a furnished apartment with television as his only means of contact with the outside world - without knowing why, Dae-su watches a news report accusing him of having murdered his wife. For fifteen years he remains locked up, writing in a journal (enumerating his many sins, such as the married women with whom he's slept, and the possible individuals, cuckolded husbands, responsible for putting him away), tattooing a tally on his hand for the years lost, keeping fit with imaginary training, slowly digging a hole through the brick wall with a chopstick.

Just as he's about to escape, a woman enters his room and hypnotizes him. Outside in the world once again as a fugitive, he's handed a billfold of money and a cellphone, which rings with a voice saying: "I'm a scholar studying you."

Based on a Japanese manga by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya, director Chan-wook Park's shock-and-awe suspenseful thriller (though the acting is cartoonish along with dubbing that makes the English dialogue sound amateurish, the story is compelling) pits one man's obsession for revenge against another's creative determination to have vengeance for a terrible wrong committed in the distant past.

Dai-su enters a sushi eatery where he orders and consumes a live octopus; he faints and wakes in the apartment of Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong), the lonely sushi girl who had served him. After nursing him and reading his journals ("I like you"), she helps him locate information (his daughter Eva went to Stockholm to live with foster parents) and goes with him to restaurants as he tastes dumplings, searching for a match with the distinctive flavor of those during his confinement.

But when Mi-do receives a message on her computer from the same person who made contact by cellphone ("Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same"), Dai-su concludes he can't even trust her.

On his own he finds a guy in a security firm that made tape recordings of his period in prison; in an effort to extract information, Dai-su employs a claw hammer to yank teeth. He battles a gang in an alley with a knife stuck in his back; on the street after fainting from loss of blood, he's helped into a car (the familiar voice again) that takes him back to Mi-do.

An audio-tape recording he'd retrieved has the voice of his nemesis saying: "Oh Dai-su talks too much." Another cellphone call, quoting from Proverbs, advises, "like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler, free yourself " from what Dai-su recognizes as "living life in a bigger prison."

Eventually he discovers the whereabouts of an Evergreen Oldboy from Sangnok High, Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae), whose sister, Soo-ah (Yun Jin-see), had been in high school with Dai-su, though he has no recollection of her, and committed suicide in 1979 before graduation "because of you."

In Dai-su's clutches, Woo-jin, saying it's all a game with six days remaining until July 5th - "If you succeed, I'll kill myself instead of Mi-do" - manages to avoid death at the hands of the monster he's created by appealing to Dai-su's curiosity as to why he's been incarcerated and tortured for all these years, asking if he wants "revenge or the truth?"

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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