Fifteen years earlier, a drunken Oh Dae-su is arrested and detained at a police station. There he shows himself to be a complete prat, trying to urinate in the waiting room, insulting the unseen officers, and generally making a fool of himself. He has a pair of small angel’s wings he bought for his young daughter’s birthday. He tries them on, but he’s no angel. A friend comes to take him home, but as soon as his back is turned, Oh Dae-su vanishes off the street. He’s been kidnapped and taken to an unknown location, locked in a room where he will live for the next fifteen years. Others too are imprisoned there, each in their own room. He doesn’t know who’s imprisoned him, or why. He has a television, a false view at the window, a bed, a desk, and a shower and loo. The wallpaper could be from any badly decorated rundown apartment. Periodically, gas is fed into the room, knocking him out. When he wakes up, he’s had a new haircut or some other routine procedure has been carried out. Cooped up, he begins to go mad. The television becomes his main focus - his lover, his window on the outside world. It also informs him that his wife has been killed and that he’s the main suspect.

A montage of news events counts past the years. Eventually, after the appearance of a mysterious woman who hypnotises him, he awakens to find himself on the roof of an apartment building, where a man is about to commit suicide.

From then on, Oh Dae-su is determined to know the truth about why he was imprisoned. Like Park Chan-Wook’s previous film, ‘Sympathy For Mr Vengeance,’ this is a revenge drama. It’s part of an Extreme Asia cinema trend that has pushed the boundaries of what appears on mainstream screens. ‘Old Boy’ is a revenge drama of almost Classical proportions, with an ending that is one shock after another.

Oh Dae-su is given a mobile phone and a wallet full of money by a stranger on the street. He is befriended by a young woman after passing out in a sushi bar. He’s called by a man who asks him if he likes his new clothes. Soon this man will give him five days to find out the truth, or the young woman he’s now with will die. Finding out the truth is a contorted journey into the past. And as the film progresses, the tension heightens. In his one room prison, Oh Dae-su was determined to get fit and took up boxing, punching the wall painfully, until calluses developed on his hands. He puts his training to good use, fighting off crowds of heavies.

Visually this film is extremely well-shot. There’s also fantasy scenes, particularly a wonderful one on a train where a giant ant sits at the end of a carriage. The soundtrack too is just right, with a waltz appearing time and again as a signature tune. The waltz is appropriate, because Oh Dae-su’s tormenter is playing with him, leading him on like a would-be lover. It brings to mind Truffaut’s comment about Hitchcock where love scenes were shot like murder scenes, and murder scenes shot like love scenes. There’s something of this perversity in ‘Old Boy.’ But that’s only the start of this film’s tendency to walk on the taboo side. Anyone with a sensitive, easily offended (or not so easily offended) disposition should think twice before seeing this film. There’s a scene in the sushi bar that won’t just offend vegetarians. And then there’s the revelations towards the end, and the ending itself. The shots of the snowy landscape there represent a mind wiped clean. A fresh page, a new start. It’s the manner in which that new start is achieved that’s the issue.

The imprisonment scenes, which only take up the early part of the film, are interesting in the way they mirror modern life: Oh Dae-su is living on a diet of TV and junk food, getting no exercise until he takes up boxing. He stares at the screen with that hypnotised vacant expression of the couch potato. It’s years before he can motivate himself to even attempt to escape. The television, beaming out the usual junk TV banality, is an effective sedative, which is true perhaps of real life. Revenge, on the other hand, is the primary motivating factor not just for Oh Dae-su, but for his tormenter. They are both kept alive by their cat and mouse game. They need each other desperately, just as they will ultimately bring about the other’s destruction, one way or another.

In spite of all this, there are many moments of humour and poignancy. ‘Old Boy’ is not a flashy shallow thriller. At the centre of this film lies a tragic twisted heart, sympathetic and horrifying at the same time. Almost everyone in this film is on the wrong side of morality and the law. The man responsible for Oh Dae-su’s imprisonment is no simple bad guy. Rich and charismatic, he’s also arrogant but heartbroken.

The film’s humour too is dark. As seen in the trailers, suicide man who appears at the beginning, does indeed throw himself off the building. He bounces off the roof of a car as Oh Dae-su walks away from the building. “Laugh and the world laughs with you” Oh Dae-su narrates. By the end, you’ll just be picking your jaw off the floor.