OLDBOY: a Film Review

🎬 Oldboy dir. Park Chan-Wook 2003

📍saw at the cinema

Counter Gaze Meter: ★☆☆☆☆: Reproduced Gaze

Trigger Warning: Mentions of sexual assault

Oldboy… What the F was that? That was my main impression coming out of the cinema after having watched this film. This was sold to me as a cinematic masterpiece, one of the best psychological thrillers/revenge movies, yet I came out feeling quite disturbed (which I know is the point). I usually love psychological thrillers and yes from all points cinema it was of excellent quality: the cinematography, the editing, the acting, the sets, … But is that ENOUGH? I believe that the status of a film as a “classic” does not exempt it from critique, in this case a VERY BAD GENDER CRITIQUE.

• Depiction of Consent:

  
  

  Where is consent in this film??? Firstly when Dae-Su forces himself onto her and she only manages to get him off her when she knocked him in the head with the knife she had already taken with her in the bathroom out of fear of him bursting in?? He apologises and she rationalises the action by considering how “hard” it must have been for him being held captive for 15 years with no sexual activity.. FIRST STRIKE. And then the girl who is MUCH YOUNGER than him (at least 25+years) tells him that when she feels ready to have sex with him she’ll let him know through a song. Even if she resists, she asks him to insist. Everything is wrong with this 15-20 min sequence. Consent is not abstract. You do not force consent. The idea of sex is framed as a right for men, something owed and a duty for women. INCREDIBLY DISTURBING that people do not realise how problematic this is.

• Sex for women = Pain:

  
  

  When they finally do have sex, she is visibly and vocally in pain but lets him know that she just wants to please him so she’ll bear the pain for him… This again incredibly problematic as it portrays female sexual pleasure as non-existent. Sex does not have to be painful. This scene normalises pain during sex for women. Something that you must put up with so long you please a man. Almost like a gift, a sacrifice. I HATE THAT.

• Nudity:

  
  

  Again same trope I saw two sets of zoomed-in sexually filmed boobs for one pair of male bum-cheeks shot from a very far distance… More male gaze. Really disliked that. For so many years women have been sexualised in films and yet again here we are with unequal shots of the human body. DO BETTER

• Overall violence:

  
  

  Yes it is a thriller film and violence makes sense. But whoever thought up this story is thoroughly disturbed. The revelation sequence of the plot twist is quite good in my opinion even though incredible disturbing. (SPOILER) When Dae-Su finds out that his punishment for revealing to his friend in school 30 years prior that he saw his then schoolmate-now-captor having sex with his own sister is to fall in love with his daughter who he’s had sexual relations already without knowing is very distressing. The tongue cutting, boot-licking and barking sequence was so traumatizing that I couldn’t help myself from laughing at how disturbed I felt. I guess the goal was to shock and in that sense they managed it perfectly.

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Counter Gaze Meter: ★☆☆☆☆: Reproduced Gaze

Oldboy is an unapologetically disturbing film that plays with the audience's taboos and sensibilities. Park Chan-Wook's revenge trope charicatures humankind's propensity to madness and loneliness where there is no good vs evil. The morality articulated in this film is to be understood as there is no right or wrong and both protagonists are prisoners to their mistakes which drives them literally mad. While a cinematic feast for the eyes, it remains a very MASCULINE film not that it every pretended to be anything else but its portrayal of women creates the greatest victim of all. The gaze is beyond masculine, reproducing and burying women in a rhetoric of submission and passivity. One could say that it is a film of its time made by a man for men. One would hope that if it was remade today it would be more sensitive to such issues. I have not seen the Spike Lee version, I would be curious to see the reinterpretation made ten years later in 2013. JUST DO BETTER please I beg you,.