South Korean Film "Old Boy" as told by hardcopy

Hi I'm hardcopy, and I almost hit a deer once driving to church.

This movie was really something to see.  Before I even get to the praise I will be drowning this wonderful piece of art with, I would like to come out of my International Movie closet and mention that I am recently getting into foreign films.  Old Boy was probably the best foreign movie I have seen yet.  Like American Psycho it gives you an in depth look on how really screwed up the human mind can be.  Normally I have a tough time watching movies that are subbed, but for some reason Netflix only gave me an option of seeing this dubbed, which was not as painful as I thought it was going to be, but still it didn't take away from how horrifying the true meaning of this movie really is.  Al

 Old Boy is actually the second of a trilogy of South Korean films.  The first movie of the "series" was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and was followed by Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.  I, myself, have never watched these other two before, but I look forward to in the future.  The manga also came before the film, but from what I have heard it's not really based exactly to the T.  Still even from the people I know who have read it saw the movie as a great masterpiece.

The messages from the film that I have got are 1) you can choose your life to be in bliss and completely shut out the truth to live in a lie or 2) know the truth but live your life as a monster, and 3)how the main character is constantly trapped in a prison physically, mentally, emotionally, created by someone else, and ultimately by his own hand.  The message of revenge is also strongly commented more than once in the movie (along with a few quotations from The Counte of Monte Cristo), but it's more obvious than the underlying messages.  And many have interpreted this movie to teach something different, which is great because this is a type of film that leaves you curious to see how everyone thinks about it.

The main character in this movie is Dae-Su.  Throughout the film he also narrates his story.  In the first scene of the movie, Dae-Su is in a police station. It is never explained exactly why he's taken in, but he is extremely drunk and has moments when he can't control himself.  He tells one of the officers that he was out buying a present for his daughter because it's her birthday.  He shows the angel wings, that have back straps on them, and puts them on for them to see.  Constantly he is told to sit down and try to control himself, but he keeps talking to the officers and bothering other people in the station.  He ends up staying there until his friend pays his bail so Dae-Su can go home.  He talks to his wife and daughter at a phone booth, and after his friend talks to his wife, he turns around to see that Dae-Su went missing. 

He is dragged to a prison.  He explains his life there.  He is fed dumplings everyday for 15 years, writes down his memoirs, watches TV, gets drugged every night, and hallucinates.  After every year that goes by, Dae-Su carves a line of ink in the outside of his hand so he can remember how long he is in there for.  He explains that it is hard to tell time and how long you have been in there for when there is no clock or window.  While he is in prison after a few years, a news report comes on the television stating that his wife and daughter are killed, and because Dae-Su's body hasn't been found, he is the main suspect. 

When fifteen years are up, he is put under a hypnosis and wakes up in a suit inside a large suitcase outside on the top of a building.  He sees a man ready to jump to kill himself, and Dae-Su pulls him up and tells him about his life in prison.  Dae-Su says that he is determined to find his captor to get revenge on his family's death.  He goes to a  restaurant and meets a chef who works there named Mi-do.  During his meal and very odd order (a live octopus), a cell phone the suicidal man gave him starts to ring.  When he answers, he hears a random voice and hangs up.  After he eats the octopus, he passes out, and Mi-do brings him to her house. 

For the rest of the movie, Dae-Su is trying to discover who his captor is along with Mi-do's help.

Full Plot (Spoilers)

During the movie you notice how very strange the majority of the film is.  There are scenes of random mishaps, but the film actually gives you all the right information to figure out the mystery along with the characters but you don't notice until the plot picks up to the end.  Dae-Su, and this is key, continues to narrate.  You find out why at the very end. One particular strange aspect of the film is Dae-Su's and Mi-do's relationship.  Sometimes she pisses him off, sometimes he leaves, then she ends up helping him anyway, and they eventually have sex.  Because of Mi-do's whining, it's heavily implied that it was her first time. 

So after a bunch of events, Dae-Su meets up with an old friend, the same one who bailed him out in the beginning of the movie, and he was able to trace information back to the business that put him in the prison for so long.  In the tape he retrieves, Dae-Su listens to a conversation between his captor and a spokesperson.  The conversation goes kinda like this:

Spokesperson: "How long do you want him in for?"
Captor: "Fifteen years."
S: "Uh..."
C: "Is that a problem?"
S: "Not...really...but why so long?"
C: "He talks too much."

Dae-Su finds the captor, a businessman by the name Woo-jin.  He gives him until a certain date to find out why he has put him away, and they both agree to settle it that day in Woo-jin's penthouse.  Woo-jin's scenes appear frequently with him speaking to someone about Mi-do and Dae-Su.  He also still finds ways to stay in contact with Dae-Su and know his every move by tracking him.  Dae-Su ends up going back to his own high school after getting a tip about a girl who died by jumping off a bridge.  From what he knows at that point is that she has supposedly slept around with other men and couldn't live with her life.  After going back into his memory, he remembers the girl, Soo-ah, Woo-jin's sister.  In his flashback Dae-Su is running around throughout the school grounds; he is actually following Soo-ah and Woo-jin who he finds at the school after hours.  They sneak into a library and end up having sex.  Dae-Su catches a few minutes of the foreplay and leaves when he notices Soo-ah look over towards his direction in the window.

Dae-Su remembers telling his friend about what he saw and made him promise not to spread the rumor.  The rumor gets out anyway.  Back to the normal storyline, on the date that Dae-Su meets Woo-jin, he keeps Mi-do safe in his prison and won't come to get her until his score is settled.  Woo-jin gets dressed in his suit while Dae-Su explains to him that because Woo-jin got his sister got pregnant, he killed her that day at the bridge.  His proof was a picture of his sister at a bridge with the date of her death in print at the bottom.  No one else was there when the picture was taken so he must have killed her.

Woo-jin tells Dae-Su that this whole thing happened because of the rumor.  She wasn't actually pregnant and the rumor made her mind make herself appear pregnant; her period stopped and her stomach started to swell.  Woo-jin tells him that his sister jumped off the bridge and killed herself, not him murdering her.  After Dae-Su asks about his imprisonment, Woo-jin tells him that the question isn't, "why have you kept be locked up in the prison?", it's "why fifteen years?"  He gives him a present, and when Dae-Su opens it up, he sees a photo album.  The cover picture is of him, his wife, and his daughter when they were still alive.  It was an old family photo from before Dae-Su was put away.  When the pages turn, you see his daughter grow up.  She gets older, becomes a teenager, graduates school, and ends up becoming a young woman.  Her features start to resemble someone Dae-Su knows, and eventually he gets to pages of pictures taken during Dae-Su's pursuit on Woo-jin with him and Mi-do standing together in streets or in her apartment.  Dae-Su ends up realizing that Mi-do is his own daughter.  In another scene, Mi-do is sitting on Dae-Su's old bed with the birthday present, the angel wings, that Dae-Su bought for her fifteen years ago, on her back. 

Dae-Su begs and ends up cutting off his tongue in order to show Woo-jin that he is completely sorry for the rumor spread.  He also cuts off his tongue so Woo-jin doesn't force Mi-do to open an identical present she found in the prison room.  Woo-jin ends up leaving Dae-Su by himself and calls his friend to make sure that Mi-do's box stays closed. He has a flashback to what actually happened at the bridge years ago while he's in the elevator.  He then shoots himself when he reaches the ground floor.

There is more to the movie than what is written here, and there is also the very end, which I haven't explained, that determines why Dae-Su is narrating his whole story over again to someone. Eventually he creates a prison for himself to live in, but this time he will be able to live there peacefully with the help of that same person, who you have seen before in the film. 

Old Boy is definitely something you have to see if you are interested in seeing such deep movies that dive into the human mind and grabs hold of the darkest regions.  I would also recommend getting a hold of the two other movies in the series if you can.