Oldboy
🤯
Here I was thinking no film could top Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, but Park Chan-wook takes a pulp premise (man imprisoned for 15 years, no explanation, no mercy) and turns it into something operatic, cruel, and almost mythic. Every stylistic choice feels feral: the snap-zoom rage, the lurid neon, the infamous hallway fight that is one of the best fight sequences in cinema.
Choi Min-sik gives a performance that feels carved out of raw nerve. Oh Dae-su isn’t a hero or antihero; he’s a lab experiment. By the time the mystery resolves, you realise the plot was never the point, the psychological architecture was. The answer to “why” is worse than any answer to “how.”
What makes Oldboy endure isn’t just the shock, that has the force of a brick. It’s how Park weaponises empathy, forcing you to root for a man whose victory can only arrive as total annihilation. The final act isn’t cleansing; it’s an ethical dead end, where survival itself feels like a punishment.
The greatest, but most traumatic plot twist in cinema, engraved itself in to my mind.
Never watching Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy ever again.
101/100
#tubi