올드보이 (Oldboy)

Park Chan-wook's film is adapted from the Tsuchiya and Minegishi manga, which began in 1996 and supplies the shape everybody remembers: a man imprisoned in a private cell for years without being told why, released as abruptly as he was taken, and given the question of who did it and what for. From the manga: the imprisonment and the release, the hypnosis, the hunt for the jailer, and the reversal that the real punishment is the answer rather than the captivity. Filed MEDIUM, and the reason is the ending. The manga's motive is a slight remembered from school; the film replaces it with incest, the tongue, and the reveal that the trap was sprung long before Oh Dae-su walked into it. The two things the film is best known for, the corridor fight and the final scene, are not in the book at all.

Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, which is an informal series rather than a continuous story. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance share no characters and no plot; Park grouped them himself, and they are sold, screened and written about as a set. What makes them one thing: each follows a person who carries out a revenge in full and finds that completing it destroys them, filmed in the same register of long takes, sudden violence and black comedy, and each ends by handing the audience a moral position it cannot comfortably hold.