Oldboy
What is the price of our sins? And how do we live with it?
That is the central question explored throughout Oldboy. Dae Su is explicitly shown to be a terrible person. He drinks, sleeps with people's wives, and even misses his own daughter's birthday party. He doesn’t learn anything nor plan to change; his purpose is to consume everyone around him.
Yet the one thing he cares about is his daughter ironically. Whom he figuratively and literally treats like an angel. His one connection to humanity. Even when in the police station he mentions her so much that the cops get annoyed and tell him to piss off.
Even though he is blinded by his sins he still sees her as something special and something to hold onto. Yet he loses her for 15 years due to his past arrogance and for his future self to grow.
Dae Su is molded physically and mentally into something Lee always saw him as. A monster. All his sins and failures as a human and as a parent. He dreams of ants/connection all day every day. Yet being deprived of his sin makes him attempt suicide over and over again.Eventually he starts to grow as a person by acknowledging the people he wronged (WHICH DAMN BRO IS ALOT) Slowly he stops caring about revenge as he reaches his hand away from consumerism and into the natural rain.
Then just like clockwork, he is ripped away from freedom again thrown inside a case, and hypnotized. Simultaneously taking away all the progress he made in his prison and lead into a new one. You may be confused about what prison exactly is if he's free. Yet he isn't. His desire to learn the truth about his capture slowly consumes him.
He slowly becomes consumed by what is “the truth”.
Yet even then unbeknownst to him the angel he was so desperate to find meets him. Mito equally has become lost in what her purpose is here without a father who for all she knows is a murderer.
“Very lonely people that I met... they all hallucinated ants at one time”
Which emphasizes her desire to have a connection with someone rather than moving through the jungle by herself without a father figure. She realizes and sees this in Dae Su with her constantly trying to tell him to move on from his rash attempts at finding “the truth”.Since as of right now he is free. He has everything he wanted at the beginning of the film yet his old sins come crawling back after. This leads to her falling from grace when Dae Su and her give in to sexual temptation like 2 ants finally finding a colony.
And as we both know. This was the real prison that he could never escape from.
Yet even with each piece of the puzzle slowly being solved, Dae Su doesn't understand why he was captured and tortured to this length.
Why would Lee go to these lengths over just his sister?
He’s rich and handsome?
He’s supposed to have everything. Yet it's still equally hollow just like Dae Su at the beginning of the film. He has everything but guidance. He is essentially empty without his sister as his angel by his side. The first and only woman who gave him attention. His light.
Instead of staying with the angel or some guidance on his side like Dae Su should have. He still wants more from Lee to feel like he's made up for his sin. He throws Mito into the same prison he once was in as she slowly cries for him.
Still wanting to know more and solidify his “victory” Dae Su plays along with Lee and as each page turns on the photo book. We slowly learn the truth and realize he never escaped his prison.
He sees his angel along with a mirror.
And that's what's so tragic about Oldboy to me.
The worst part about looking into a mirror isn't seeing yourself in reflection. It's seeing what you've become. And what Dae Su has become and maybe always was is Lee. A shell of a man without a soul consumed by his desire and guilt. Why should he live for all the sins he’s committed?
Humanity's inability to see themselves for who they truly are...
Dae-su finds the answer and now he wants to die and bury it. This whole time he has been searching for himself and didn't know it. And that's scarier than any horror movie in my opinion.
Lee takes away the one rightful he could have had. Even by revealing the monster inside Dae Su and all of us. Lee still can't face him. Lee realizes he is just as corrupted with sins as Oh Dae Su is. Yet he has no angel to save him. No one to free himself from his sins.
So why live?
Even after staring into his abyss. Dae Su cannot live with himself knowing who he truly is and asks to be brainwashed. Ending with him laying the same way in snow as he did after escaping the suitcase. Even if he successfully does, he can never know who he truly is even when he stares at the mirror.
So then...what is his purpose when he was doomed to sin? Did the truth really free him? How could he ever fix this? Dae Su reminisces on that as he slowly forces hugs Mito maybe out of acceptance or guilt. But even then, the same question lingers as the credits play.
“Even though I'm no more than a monster - don't I, too, have the right to live?”