Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same.
If I had to choose one movie genre I love most, I’d go with thrillers, followed closely by horror. Oldboy is undoubtedly the best thriller I’ve seen in a long time and one of the most disturbing.
Park Chan-wook could not have more perfectly executed the remarkably choreographed action scenes throughout the film, as well as the music accompanying them. Oldboy hooked me from the very start of the film, but when Dae-su breaks the wooden plank with his arm mid-brawl, I realized this was more significant than I thought going into it. Composed of a single shot, the hallway scene set the bar for quality through the rest of the movie, as if it hadn’t done so already.
When the antagonist reveals the cause of Dae-su’s imprisonment in the final act, you feel a sense of discomfort like nothing else. My jaw was on the floor; I knew it’d be more than just the childhood rumor, but I was tremendously unprepared for the full extent of the revenge fulfilled by Woo-jin.
When reading the film’s synopsis, one might think the movie only aims to shock and offend, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Oldboy is a striking and monumental piece of cinema, which explains why it is comfortably thought of by many as the best film ever produced out of Korea.