Imagine you’ve had a few drinks, you’ve gotten in trouble with the police, your friend has bailed you out, and now you’re standing on the street in the rain while your friend wishes your daughter a happy birthday on the phone. The next thing you know, you’re locked in a room with only a television set for company. Your meals arrive through a slot in the door, the same meal every day. For fifteen years you live this imprisoned life until one day, spontaneously, you’re set free on the roof of an apartment building with a new suit, a cellphone, and five days to find the person responsible. This is the setup for Chan-wook Park’s brilliant revenge thriller Oldboy.
The imprisoned man is Oh Dae-su, an ordinary business man played with raw intensity by Min-sik Choi. The character of Oh Dae-su spirals through an array of personalities. At first a loud, drunken fool, you laugh at him despite your sympathies towards an apparent sweet side that lies underneath. Even as he drunkenly fights with the police officers, you don’t feel he’s a threatening force capable of taking another man’s life. Once imprisoned, he begins to teeter on the brink of insanity. Suffering through drug-induced hallucinations and a decade-and-a-half of isolation, he attempts to hang on to himself by training against the wall. Then, released back into the real world he becomes a one-track minded machine bent on destroying the person who destroyed his life. And yet, that’s just the beginning. As he gets closer and closer to the truth he appears to losing his grasp on reality, and in the final act he becomes a man so desperate to rebury what he has unearthed that he goes to extreme lengths to do it.
There is much to marvel in Min-sik Choi’s performance. Rarely have I come across an actor displaying what must surely be an exhausting menagerie of emotions without losing the character. From the first scene, he fits into Oh Dae-su like a snake inhabiting its skin. Then that skin is shed and a new skin is grown, but it’s the still the same snake. It is an exceptional skill to possess and Choi possesses it better than any other actor on the silver screen in today’s world cinema.
Best Scene: **WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS**
After finding the man responsible for his imprisonment, thanks to the help of Mi-do, a young girl he has fallen in love with, Oh Dae-su finally comes face-to-face with Woo-jin Lee. After a ferocious fight with Lee’s bodyguard, Oh Dae-su’s imprisonment is explained. It is also revealed that Mi-do’s involvement and romance with Oh Dae-su was part of Woo-jin’s payback, though Mi-do is not aware of it. As Oh Dae-su flips through a photo album presented to him by Woo-jin, he learns that Mi-do is in fact his daughter. In order to keep Mi-do in the dark about everything, Oh Dae-su vows to become Lee’s dog. He crawls around on all fours yipping and growling. In one of the most jarring moments of the film, he proceeds to cut off his own tongue with a pair of scissors to prove he will never speak of what happened. The intensity of this scene is a testament to Choi’s immense skill.
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