Oldboy

To rate Oldboy, I have to use a comparison. Imagine films as animals in an ecosystem. Most movies are prey. Some are predators.Then there are the truly great films — masterpieces. Those are apex predators. They dominate their genre, change something, push cinema forward. Oldboy is not an apex predator. It’s a meta-predator. An apex predator dominates within the ecosystem. Humans reshape the ecosystem itself. And that’s what Oldboy does — it bends the rules of cinema around itself. I went into the cinema with astronomically high expectations, and it still shattered every scale I had.