Oldboy

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Film Description

A powerful, inventive, stomach-churning thriller in which a middle-aged man seeks explanations after 15 years of unexplained imprisonment in a hotel room. He has just five days to find the reason for his imprisonment. Viscerally exciting, in-your-face filmmaking.

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Review by Barry Forshaw on 21st March 2005

Park Chan-Wook’s astonishing thriller swept all before it at Cannes (where it won the Grand Prix Jury prize), and it's hard to resist the compulsive appeal of this highly personal piece of cinema (unless, of course, you're squeamish, in which case you should steer well clear). This two disc set from Tartan really is a deluxe job, with the usual ‘making of’ documentaries and a truly startling DTS Dolby soundtrack. This darkly comic revenge movie is screwed down to a peculiarly unsettling plateau of tension. After a drunken spree, a businessman is arrested and imprisoned for 15 years. He is given no indication what his crime was, or who is responsible for his imprisonment. Suddenly, he finds himself released and is given three days to discover why he was locked away and who is behind it. This bizarre smorgasbord of The Usual Suspects, Memento and Sam Peckinpah remains a unique experience.

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Review by Rena Markogiannaki on 19th April 2006

Kidnapped and locked in a room for fifteen years without explanation Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi) promises revenge.

Dressed in a suit, carrying nothing but a mobile phone and cash-filled wallet, Oh Dae Su finds himself released with a terrifying offer of life or death from his incarcerator.
Determined for answers, Oldboy is caught in a painful and psychotic roller coaster where insanity appears to be normal.

Director Park Chan-wook is creating an original style of Asian cult films introducing explicit and enigmatic plots and engaging tragic heroes.

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Review by Alex Davidson on 15th January 2005

Oldboy is a key film in the current renaissance of Korean film, and offers an overwhelming, uncompromising vision seldom seen in Western cinema. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it tells the gritty revenge saga of Dae-Su Oh, a Korean businessman who is kidnapped and imprisoned for no given reason. Fifteen years of solitary confinement later, he is released, and embarks on a bloody mission to discover the reason for his abduction.

Park expertly handles the many different moods of the film – the opening segment of the film is comic, with Dae-su infuriating a policeman with his drunken behaviour. The tone then darkens as Dae-Su is abducted and imprisoned, whilst surreal comic interludes (a giant ant sits on a subway seat) spike the narrative to startling effect. The predicament of the hero recalls Kafka, notably The Trial, but once the villain behind the mystery is revealed - surprisingly early in the film, the film plunges into Jacobean territory, with grand guignol horror and at least one wrenching twist. An intense, exhiliarating experience.

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Review by Howard Schumann on 15th December 2004

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy is a grisly but exhilarating experience. A grand prizewinner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years. Driven only by an insane desire to get out and enact revenge on his jailer, he trains himself daily to stay in shape by punching the wall. After fifteen years, he is released but soon finds out that the world outside is as much of a prison as his room. Oldboy has plenty of action, state of the art CGI, dark humor, and an existential mystery that will linger in your mind long after the final credits have rolled. Based on a manga by Tsuchiya Garon, Oldboy has elements of revenge but to describe it as a "revenge saga" is perhaps to oversimplify things. It is a complex film about love and the price we must pay to save it.

There is a sequence where Daesu has to fight his way past a gang of thugs in a narrow hotel corridor that stands out for its naturalism. Shot in a continuous tracking shot, the scene shares the drama of a terrible struggle for survival. Like much of the movie, the scene is arresting. Oldboy is not for the squeamish, but if you can stand the grimmer moments you will enjoy one of the most memorable films of the year. Park does not condemn or stand in judgment of his characters but allows us to see them as flawed human beings who have been pushed into taking extreme measures to salvage what remains of their dignity. Oldboy can be harsh but it also has a great deal of humanity and Daesu's longing for redemption reminds us of our own vulnerability.

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Article - "Korean Film - The hottest ticket in town" by Roy Stafford
Friday 2nd June 2006

It's a good bet that every day, someone, somewhere, is negotiating a deal concerning a film made in South Korea. They might want to distribute it or remake it in America or Europe or elsewhere in East Asia, but Korean film has for several years now been the hottest t...  View article in full

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This film is part of the following Film Collections

Great Film Twists

Including: 24 (Season 1), A Tale of Two Sisters, Angel Heart, Citizen Kane, Dont Look Now, Fight Club, GoldenEye, House Of Games, Les Diaboliques, Manon Des Sources.

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