weekly classics Oldboy

No country does psychological thrillers like South Korea. With zero sense of remorse, zilch spot of rationality, zot tinge of humanity…

With absolutely nothing, Oldboy begins (See trailer here).
Oh Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik), a family man in his thirties, wakes up to solitary confinement in a motel-like prison, oblivious to how and why he had ended up in there.

For endless cold and bitter nights, he sees only the corny geometric wallpapers adorned with a ghastly portrait of a waning old man which forewarns too much of his looming predicament than it should; he hears only the doomed melody that impends the gas which raids his consciousness; he smells only this vapour, specifically Valium, made by the Russians to sedate their Chechen adversaries but now used on him; he tastes only the saltiness in the dumplings with a glut of spring onions that numbs his tongue with their cyclic flavour; he feels only the ghastly loneliness and hysterias that are slowly eating into his heart, invading what’s left of his sane mind. Most of all, he asks only the simplest question, which was never answered...

...For the past 15 years, Oh Dae-su lived a living hell without knowing why he was put in there. What unforgivable mistake had he committed to incur this unexplained imprisonment of more than a decade? Was it someone he had offended?
WHY?
“You can't find the right answers if you ask the wrong questions.”
After a span of eternity, or so it seems for Oh Dae-su, he was suddenly released on a rooftop, with no explanation. Nil. Naught. Nada.
In fact there was no sign of his previous captivity except for a tattoo of 15 stitches that he has sewed onto his hand as a painful reminder of the years stolen from him for a reason he had yet to discover.
No doubt, he became obsessive about finding his captors. Recalling the dumplings he ate daily while he was confined, he tracked down the restaurant and eventually found the “prison” which was in fact a building filled with room cubicles where the rich would pay to have others incarcerated.
There was no way these minions would know the mastermind, but they did provide him with one piece of valuable information before he fought his way out of the building with a hammer in one hand and a knife stuck in his back.
Maybe it was because of the giant live moving octopus (actor Choi Min-sik completed the scene without any computer-generated imagery) that he swallowed in front of her while her jaw dropped, because that is definitely not the kind of courage you can find in any lucid being. But as it happens, Mi-do was the only one who believed Dae-su’s encounter, and very soon became his only source of comfort in this heedless seek for vengeance.

Lee Woo-jin (played by Yoo Ji-tae) finally revealed himself as Dae-su's kidnapper, a billionaire and undoubtedly a sadist. With every taunt and goad, he maneuvered Oh Dae-su like a seasoned puppeteer, but of course, he had 15 long years to contrive a way to deal with him.
Woo-jin gave Dae-su an ultimatum of five days to discover his “evil deed” for himself or else Mi-do would not live past the fifth night. Innately (inaptly) curious, Dae-su started to seek his connection with Woo-jin and found their association in a place long forgone.