Park Chan-wook
Old Boy

"The film I've always wanted to make". Quentin Tarantino.

And you can bet he actually said it, because no film has ever brought together all the classic elements of Tarantino's cinema so perfectly, with the same care, detail, and ruthlessness as one of the most acclaimed directors of the new generation.

An obsessive, claustrophobic, and vengeful story, that of "Old Boy" (2003) by Korean director Park Chan-wook, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, presided over by Tarantino himself.
The film tells the story of a man who is kidnapped and imprisoned in a room for 15 years, without knowing why. After attempting to escape and committing suicide, he awaits his end until he is suddenly and unexpectedly released. Thus begins his slow but inexorable path towards revenge, which leads him, murder by murder, to discover his jailer and the reasons for such hatred.

Inspired by a successful manga in the Land of the Rising Sun, this film features episodes of brutality and malice rarely depicted in other cinema. The film often contains phrases/mantras that underscore the emotional and desperate journey of the protagonist, the true focal point around which the whole story unfolds. A story of innocent loves profaned with a look, of repressed frustrations, of things unsaid and never shared... in short, the key themes of the entire oriental cinema that has built entire sagas on these issues.
“If you laugh, the world laughs with you; if you cry, you cry alone.” The protagonist loves to repeat this while carrying out his uncontrolled revenge under the skillful and highly effective direction, a true compendium of the most innovative and extreme shooting and editing techniques: flashbacks, wide angles, speeded movements, mostly absent dialogues filtered through a few well-calibrated words, amazing action-effects and some unforgettable scenes for the panic effect they manage to convey (see the teeth extraction, the protagonist's self-cut tongue, or the live octopus meal...).

A STRONG film and desperately closed in on itself that speaks to us of loneliness and madness in an obsessive and desperate manner, with no possibility of escape or redemption, where even Love (the pure one or what is considered as such) can always hide a threat and an assault on one's weak points. As if to say: never trust anything or anyone. A film part of a trilogy (the first was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the last Lady Vengeance) conceived on the theme of Revenge but which, compared to the other two, better captures its soul, knowing how to better convey to us the core points of the entire existential philosophy that underpins the work of the Korean director. It's just a pity that some youngsters are truly influenced by films like this, such as the 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a troubled and psychologically unstable young man who last April was photographed in the same pose as the poster, hammer in hand and with a grim face, after massacring 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in America. And don't tell me that much of the blame should be attributed to films like these, eh?

All in all, apart from everything else: a film for those with strong stomachs that leaves you literally breathless but also... absolutely worth watching and enjoying at least a couple of times.