After years of introducing myself to the goriest, bloodiest of horror films for the sake of not missing out, I don’t feel the need to squirm and/or cover my eyes anymore. But something about the violence of Oldboy, the intrusive, inescapable, in-your-face nature of it all had me watching it through my fingers.

Oldboy, at least in Internet film circles, is known as a film that can traumatize one’s friends, when shown to them without proper warning. There are scenes of ants crawling out of a man’s skin, a violent escape sequence, and teeth being graphically pulled out of a man’s mouth – and that doesn’t even include the thematic and visual terror of the film’s climax and denouement. Oldboy is layers upon layers of sickening.

The first time I watched the film was on a DVD rented from the Boston Public Library, on my laptop and in two separate parts, due to my scattered free time. Still, I was profoundly scarred by and obsessed with the film. Park Chan-Wook’s masterful ability to make audiences equal parts uncomfortable and enraptured was wildly impressive. Oldboy is often a gateway into the rest of his filmography, and Korean cinema as a whole.

The inclination to scar one’s friends with depraved, horrifying, and often mind-reshaping cinema seems to be one born out of pure pretentiousness. Once you mint yourself any sort of film expert, the logical next step is, of course, to assert your expertise over anyone who watches movies less ‘seriously’ than you do. I’m fully aware of being perceived like this, and often attempt to avoid exhibiting this behavior, but I often do it anyway.

This tendency, as annoying as it is to receive, is truly born out of love, for friends and for cinema. I wish to show my friends Oldboy so that they can understand what makes me so obsessed with it so that our brains can be rewired on the same level, so that we can revel in this shared cinematic experience. We don’t watch movies to watch them alone. Though in many cases I find that a beautiful pastime, whenever I do watch a movie by myself my immediate urge is to talk to all of my friends about it, to get them to understand what I’m talking about and why I’m talking about it so much. Even when I watch movies alone, I have to find people to talk about these movies with because film is best as a shared experience, in whatever way that looks. An exceptional film will enhance this desire to share and talk about it even more.

Oldboy is unique in that it is a film that fundamentally changes you – but that’s not to say that all life-changing films scar you. Oldboy pulls your teeth, it’s jarring and permanent, and even without the violence, it is shocking beyond expectation. Cinema’s power to reshape how you think and experience the world, even for a short burst of time, is what makes it so captivating. Lady Bird, Get Out, Cinema Paradiso, Parasite, Goodfellas, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives are all varied examples of films that have changed my life and often love to engage in conversations about.

I wouldn’t force my unwilling friends to watch Oldboy, costing them their innocence and belief in all things good (I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but Oldboy is such a shocking film). But I love to indulge in the shared cinematic experience in every way possible. Whether this means dragging my friends to all sorts of weird films they’ve expressed even the smallest interest in, rewatching new releases over and over to experience them with as many friends as possible, or scouring the programming of local theaters to see if any of my old favorites will be playing on the big screen.

In short, this is my plea, to get film enjoyers of all kinds to watch Oldboy. If not Oldboy, then something else outside of your comfort zone, something that gets more than skin-deep, something that will draw real blood. Art, specifically cinema, is more than just entertainment. The power that it holds over how we experience the world and live our lives is so seductively strong and important; I beg you all to indulge.
The 4k restoration of Oldboy opens at the Brattle Theater on October 13.

Until next time,

Karenna

Photograph: Offscreen

Pulling Teeth