old boy

 As films go, it is sadistic, gory, twisted and sick.It is like a Shakespearean tragedy in the epic scale of the characters’ personal destruction.It hits all the sicko themes, from incest to torture, as the audience is treated to teeth being extracted by pliers and unforgivable sex scenes. Yet somehow you have to watch to the end. It was directed by Park Chan-wook, one of Korea’s best directors, and he did a grotesquely beautiful job. Every gesture and musical rhythm is planned, so that there is a sort of sick artistic beauty even as someone blows his brains out in a lift. There is a scene in which the protagonist Oh Daesu fights his way through a line up of baseball bat wielding thugs that ends up resembling a baroque painting more than a modern film.The film is drastically different to the mange in almost all the details, including motivation of the antagonist, who is responsible for having locked up Oh Daesu for over a decade in a private jail. Yet the central themes are the same: the protagonists life is being manipulated and ultimately destroyed by another over a trivial childhood incident. Oh Daesu seeks to avenge his 15 year suffering, and yet it is too late, his life has already been manipulated out of his control and can never be reclaimed. I don’t think I have ever seen a film more twisted.