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It is a film noir of revenge and cynically calculative contemplations told under a highly restricted narrative. The film opens in media res the release of the main protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), from a misery jail after being detained there for 15 years. Subsequent story development centres around his search for the cause of his detainment and revenge on the back seat driver. This product noir comes with an explicit motif of revenge and frames the theme by parallelism expressed in the form of visual (the beginning and the ending shots) and narrative parallel (not to be disclosed here).

Story causality is weak in the first half of the film as the plot proceeds without disclosing the cause and effect of the characters' behaviour, rendering merely an interrupted or piecemeal causality from which the spectator has to re-assemble the pieces for deciphering the diegesis. By that, the director successfully creates a high degree of suspense down the line. Suspense does not diminish in the second half of the movie although some hints are disclosed because the director then adopts blocks of cross editing (scenes of same temporal dimension) and parallel editing (scenes without temporal relation) to escalate the pace of story progression as well as the flagrant mood of the viewer.

The story is far out of reality but the sinful contemplations and the lust for revenge endemic to human beings and their power of destruction are realistically and sufficiently depicted. The film magnifies violence, torture and incest in ideology but downplays them in terms of visuals as violent staging is covertly narrated without a deluge of excessively disgusting scenes. The cynical ideology is visually reinforced by the costume (hair style) and staging (mildly exaggerated body gestures and facial expressions) of Oh Dae-su.

The movie is made a lot of cinematographic and editing features: elliptical editing; tight frontal close ups of characters; variation in colour tones (representing different time dimensions); comic like mise-en-scene (even with graphics); freeze action (not freeze frame) and juxtaposed images. Most notably, the director does not use decoupage in a few occasions for change of story locales or spatial planes but resorts to the use of a single tracking shot in which the camera tracks across 2 sets of props and settings of no physical spatial relation in the narrative (i.e., using different props and settings in the same shooting locale to replace editing in narrating the transition of physical space in the plot).

In terms of musical aesthetics, the film is also characterized by a disparity of music and narrative context. The use of violin and cello among other instruments in the music produces a sense of congeniality and harmony in melody which is not consonant with the excessively unstable psychiatrics of the 2 main characters and the motif of revenge. This artistic device bears some similarity with Stanley Kubrick's famed "Clockwork Orange" (1971).

Despite of the un-tasteful theme and the ideology of violence, the aesthetic elements in narrative, image and sound of the film render itself a remarkable one.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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