Twenty Years Later, Oldboy is Park Chan-Wook’s Anti-Revenge Masterpiece

It’s twenty years since Park Chan-Wook released the legendary revenge thriller Oldboy – and I went back to watch it again and find out if it’s still as shocking as it was when it first dropped.

The middle part to his excellent Vengeance Trilogy (bookended by Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Lady Vengenace), Oldboy is an iconic piece of cinema. From the moment it hit Cannes in 2004 and scooped the Grand Prix, it’s carved out this very specific place in pop culture that very few other movies have ever managed to come close to: completely jaw-dropping shock value matched with incredible cinematic quality and genuine storytelling chops, along with an amazing central performance from Choi Min-Sik.

When I first heard about it, though, it was one of those movies that appealed to my teenage sense of Watching The Most Shocking Stuff I Could to Prove a Point. Oldboy has a reputation for one of the most horrifying twists in all of cinema: I won’t spoil it here, on the small off-chance you’re reading this and haven’t seen it, but suffice to say that….actually, no, nothing will suffice to say. It’s fucking horrible. Even as an edgelord teenager, I found it really disturbing, and this was around the time I was watching garbage like Human Centipede 2.

But I think this rewatch actually rendered this twist even more shocking, just because of how well it’s built in to the story and how brutal the reveal of it actually is. Oldboy is a revenge movie in the mould of movies like I Saw The Devil (also starring Min-Sik) and Wind River, which is to say, it’s an anti-revenge movie; revenge is the driving force behind both the antagonist and protagonist, but both of them are left ultimately wrecked by the pursuit and even successful execution of their long-awaited payback. The twist makes sense in that regard, because it’s a punishment for the pursuit of that revenge – it’s baked into the plot and the themes in such a way that it makes sense, and it lands with even more weight as a result.

Chan-Wook is an extraordinary director, one who should always be in contention for the best of all time whenever that conversation comes up, and it’s a credit to his skill and control that he doesn’t let this twist swallow the entire movie whole. His sheer deftness behind the camera is on display across this whole movie – I mean, that hallway fight scene, come on – but this is the most impressive thing he pulls off for me. Yes, it’s horrifying, but it’s sumptuously well-made, with a dagger-sharp point that pins it into your brain whether you want it to or not.

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By Lou MacGregor

(header image via IMDB)