Oldboy

A revenge film set in Korea. Oh Dae-su is at a police station one night, drunk. A friend collects him and leaves him at a phone box; he disappears at that moment. He wakes in a room. No door, no window, a television, and the same meal delivered through a hatch every day. He does not know by whom or why he is held. From the television he learns his wife has been killed and that he is wanted for it. Fifteen years pass. He marks the wall, trains himself to fight and digs a tunnel. Then one day, with no explanation, he is let out. From there the film is a search. A restaurant, a young woman who runs it, a prison record, and a taste that leads him to where the meals came from. The corridor fight is its best known scene. Shot from the side in one take, with no cuts, and the fighting is realistically exhausted. What the narrative is interested in is not revenge but a question: the man asks why he was imprisoned, and the film says the real question is why he was released. The information at the end takes the narrative somewhere else entirely and all its weight is there. The source is a Japanese comic, but the film departs from it considerably; the idea at the end belongs entirely to the adaptation. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes. The octopus scene is real and the actor had to shoot it several times. Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae and Kang Hye-jung are in the cast. Park Chan-wook directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard Korean cinema and stylised violence. Who it is not for: anyone the subject would weigh on; the ending is genuinely disturbing and the film never softens.