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🌱 oldboy - a movie review

Note: this review contains spoilers.

The following review is a stream of consciousness reaction to Oldboy, the 2003 Korean action/thriller/horror movie. Much in the spirit of [[🌰 it’s not about writing, it’s about thinking]], you’ll read my processing and sense-making of the director’s choices in realtime.

  • wtf
  • wtf
  • it’s interesting how after fighting the whole movie for the truth, in the end he chooses the lie
  • also, I’m sure it would feel different to be in Dae Sun’s shoes. But like..Woo Jin slept with his sister. On purpose. Meanwhile he had to…kidnap Dae Sun, murder his wife, kidnap his daughter, raise his daughter from the age of 3 and hypnotize her, presumably drug her repeatedly because she also has that ant thing. Kidnap Dae Sun, keep him hostage for 15 years, torture him, drug him, and hypnotize him. All to get them to sleep with each other.
  • Like, have some self-compassion dude. Do some therapy, tell your daughter, try to build a relationship together. OR get BOTH yourselves hypnotized to forget that you’d had sex and to undo the whole falling in love but if you can. (Let’s be real– the movie played very fast and loose with what hypnotism can do.) But hypnotizing yourself to forget she’s your daughter and then not telling her? Wild bro.
    • Don’t quite follow it. Don’t quite understand. I suppose the movie wants me to pretend the only options are to live with the truth or forget that one part of the truth. But I don’t think it convinced me of that yet.
    • Then again, if one of my kids did something horrible, something they’d be truly traumatized and horrified by, something that would change the way they saw themselves and myself. And they did it through no fault of their own but because someone was angry with me and tricked them. Would I blame myself? Absolutely. Would I do everything in my power, whatever it would take, to prevent them from realizing what they did? Yeah, probably. Would I choose an option where I live but they continue to do that horrible thing? Or would I choose an option where they never do the horrible thing again but I die? I feel like in his case…the latter is preferable?
    • You know….he chooses the opposite of Woo Jin’s sister. She chooses to die, though not due to the shame or horror: she explicitly says that she has no regrets. So not quite the opposite. But he chooses to live continuing the horror and making himself happy with the horror, because he is horrified by it. Whereas she chooses to die, not living in the horror because she doesn’t feel it? There’s possibly something there, but I’m not sure yet.
  • Also feels like…feels like the rumors weren’t even that she slept with her brother? Sounds like it was that she was a slut? Which imma be real, sounds like a much better “rumor” than the, uh, truth.
  • the way the movie is shot is great. I was confused about Mido’s characterization but by the end it made total sense. Everything was well done, just very dark, and I think the plot…I’m not yet there. I’m not quite sure how the ending talks to the rest of the movie. Maybe it’ll make more sense over time.
  • Little things make sense now: why 15? Not because that’s how old his sister was when she died. But because Mido is now 18. Is “Mido” supposed to sound a little like an abbreviated “My daughter”? When his friend asks who Mido is in the beginning, he says “a little girl who cries a lot.”
  • The other thing that didn’t quite fit were the ages. They spent a lot of time using Jin Woo’s mostly naked body to suggest he’s like mid 30s at most. Dae Sun looks 50 at youngest. And yet Jin Woo looks very close in age to his sister, who’s in the same year as Dae Sun. Or at least within 4 years. You can argue that one ages a lot in a weird prison-and-torture-chamber-for-hire, I suppose. But definitely took me out of the movie for a bit.

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Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.